UK data cops warn Optical Express to stop spamming 1000s of customers High Street optician Optical Express has been admonished by Britain's data watchdog after thousands of customers complained that the company was sending them nuisance text messages. The Information Commissioner's Office warned Optical Express to halt its actions, or else face further action. An enforcement notice (PDF) was …
Only they are at it too. While the ICO is at it, they should slap a notice on them too.
The really unfortunate thing is that Specsavers won a contract from the DVLA to do the eye tests. They then take those 'customers' and add them to their spam list. If you then request a copy of the test result, Specsavers refuse to send it to you citing commercial proprietary. Bloody effin' cheek considering it is a government contract AND you are allowed by law (called Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act) to request your data. This is on top of being marketed too to come in for further eye tests.
They should be fined, massively.
The enforcement notice is only counting from 10th September 2013 for those 4609 complaints but they've been at it since at least 2011 as I sent them an email on 11th October 2011 when they sent me an unsolicited SMS to which I received no reply, and then on 24th April 2012 when they did it again. That time they did at least reply and tried to blame it on a third party marketing company and told me to contact them.
Good to see the ICO actually doing something for once, even if it is only telling them to stop it.
Been going on for years. Think they were my first piece of "text spam", IIRC.
Got them.
Deleted them.
When they still came in, and in, and in, and in, I complained.
They stopped soon after.
Sorry, but if the ONLY way to sell to me is to splat millions of people at random with dozens of unwanted texts, I DO NOT WANT YOUR PRODUCT. Ever. At all. Certainly not from you, anyhow.
Oh, look, yet another headline grabbing story for the ICO! What they don't tell you is that, for the overwhelming majority of complaints submitted to the ICO about direct marketing, most of them are a total waste of time. A combination of incompetent case officers and a policy of only taking action if they receive lots of complaints about the same company means that most companies can carry on regardless. For example, if Optical Express sent me the marketing and I complained, as long as that company stops sending me marketing the ICO will be happy. The company can carry on abusing the rights of thousands of others unless they too complain. And it's only when enough people complain that the ICO will think about doing anything.
This is a poor use of limited resources in my opinion. If I submit a complaint against a company and the ICO upholds my complaint then they should advise the company of their obligations, give them 30 days to contest the ICO's view, and warn them that any further similar complaints received after 30 days will result in criminal prosecution. Job done! And... the ICO needs to be prosecuting these companies so that we get some precedent because at the moment the Commissioner is just giving his own view. He needs to go to court and get a court ruling so that his guidance becomes law.
The fact remains that nearly every single company that I do business with will abuse my data protection rights in some way. It's an utter failure by the Commissioner.
Webmaster www.mindmydata.co.uk
Doesn't surprise me in the slightest. This mob are up to a lot more worse than spamming! Wouldn't surprise me if their weighed up the costs beforehand.
I do hope they have changed the 5 character Domain Administrator user that had a 5 character password they used to access every store! Oops....
Clearly you don't keep up with the news.
Laser eye surgery isn't permanent, far from it. Sometimes the only fix for botched laser surgery is... more laser surgery. No guarantees are provided.
And the DVLA are looking into cases where someone has laser eye surgery, passes the test / paperwork to confirm they have no need for glasses when driving any more, and then a few years later are arrested because their eyesight has dipped below the legal standard again.
More important, it's a functional surgery, not a cosmetic one. Cosmetic ones, I can understand (but not condone) the spamming to a certain extent, as an "impulse buy". But either your eyes are bad and you need surgery or you don't. Spamming customers isn't going to help you.
They will need to update their communication policy:
http://www.opticalexpress.co.uk/blog/customer-care/our-communication-policy-explained.html
On occasion, we receive enquiries from people who have received communication from us by way of letter, an email, SMS or even a phone call who are unsure why we are contacting them. We thought it would be helpful to explain why we might be trying to contact you, why we have your details and how you can opt-out of such communications.
As the UK’s leading eye care provider, we are fully committed to ensuring we perform to the highest standards in everything that we do. We only ever contact you for one of two reasons: you have either explicitly told us that you are interested in one of our products or treatments, or we have sent you a communication via a third party data-provider that you have opted-in to receive information and offers from trusted organisations such as Optical Express.
Internal Communication
Optical Express collate our internal communications list from a number of sources. The most common is directly from our own patients. If you have had an eye test with us, bought glasses or contact lenses or even attended a laser eye surgery consultation then you will be added to our customer database and may receive communications, unless you have asked not to be contacted. We may also collect data from our marketing campaigns where an individual has contacted us directly with their details such as in response to a television advert or by entering details on an enquiry form requesting further information from us.
We have a number of checks in place to ensure that any individual who does not wish to receive marketing communications from us can ‘opt-out’ of future communications. Every email and SMS message has an ‘opt-out’ statement which will unsubscribe you from any further communication from us. If you are called but do not wish to receive any further calls, simply tell the operator that you do not wish to be contacted in future or, alternatively, you can email our Customer Care department at customerservices@opticalexpress.com who will process your request.
We do not share our customer database with any other party. As is stated in our Terms and Conditions, we may share your information with other businesses in the Optical Express Group, such as The Dental Clinic or The Cosmetic Clinic.
Please also be aware that even if you are unsubscribed from our internal communications list, you may still receive communication from an external marketing partner.
External Marketing Communications
We also work with carefully selected third party data-providers. We will only enter into a commercial agreement with a partner data-provider if they satisfy us that the data has been obtained in compliance with legal requirements such as the Data Protection Act 1998 (“DPA”) and the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (“PECR”), and that they can prove that the individuals listed within the database have explicitly consented to receiving promotional material from third parties, such as Optical Express.
We take this responsibility seriously and investigate prospective data-providers for any obvious history of data misuse. Where we are or become aware that a prospective data-provider has a history of data misuse, we do not use the data-provider.
If you find that you are receiving unwarranted communications, we cannot unsubscribe you directly from such marketing databases as we are not the data owner and do not have access to the data itself. However, on request, we can provide you with details of the data-provider that holds your data. On occasion, we can contact the data-provider and request your removal but the data provider is not legally bound to unsubscribe you on our request. We can unsubscribe you from further communication from Optical Express internal database and the mailing list that you have requested removal from, although please be aware that your data may be on further marketing databases and you may need to unsubscribe from these databases individually.
No future communication requests
If we have contacted you and you do not wish to receive any further communication from us, you can:
Email: Click on the ‘unsubscribe’ link which we include at the bottom of every email we send. Please note that if you are subscribed to numerous lists, you may need to unsubscribe to each email that you receive.
SMS: We always include an opt-out message at the end of the SMS. Simply reply with the word ‘STOP’.
If you do not wish to click on the link or reply to the SMS message, you can send an email to our Customer Care team at customerservices@opticalexpress.com and they will be able to process your removal request. Please include your name and any email addresses or telephone numbers which we may have. Please give us up to 5 working days for us to process your removal.
Where we have communicated to you via a third party data-provider, we will be able to provide you with details of the provider and their contact details. You can then contact the provider directly and they will be in a position to inform you where they received your consent and remove you from their database, if you require it. Optical Express is unable to provide these details – only the third party supplier has access to your information.
Third Party Databases
If you are on a data-provider’s database, there is an increased likelihood that more data-providers will also have your details. When you give your details to some businesses, they will often ask whether you are happy to share your information with their networks. Some of these will ask you to ‘opt-in’ to sharing your information, whilst some will ask you to ‘opt-out’. Always read these statements carefully and be aware that if you do allow them to share your details, then you may be contacted by other businesses in their network.
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