Catalogue Retailer Easylife Fined £1.48 Million For Breaking Data Protection and Electronic Marketing Laws

The Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) has fined Easylife Ltd £1,350,000 for using personal information of 145,400 customers to predict their medical condition and target them with health-related products without their consent.

The company was also fined £130,000 for making 1,345,732 predatory direct marketing calls.

Easylife is a catalogue retailer that sells household items, as well as services and products under their Health, Motor, Supercard, and Gardening Clubs.

The ICO investigation found that when a customer purchased a product from Easylife’s Health Club catalogue, the company would make assumptions about their medical condition and then market health-related products to them without their consent.

For example, if a person bought a jar opener or a dinner tray, Easylife would use that purchase data to assume that person has arthritis and then call the individual to market glucosamine joint patches.

Out of 122 products in Easylife’s Health Club catalogue, 80 items were considered to be ‘trigger products’. Once these products were purchased, Easlylife would profile the customer to target them with a health-related item.

The ICO found that significant profiling of customers and ‘invisible’ processing of health data took place. It is ‘invisible’ because people were unaware the company was collecting and using their personal data for that purpose. This is against data protection law.

In a separate investigation the ICO found that, between 1 August 2019 and 19 August 2020, Easylife made 1,345,732 unwanted marketing calls to people registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS).

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), live marketing calls should not be made to anyone who has registered with the TPS, unless they have told the caller that they wish to receive calls from them.

The ICO received 25 complaints about Easylife, with people saying they felt angry, anxious, threatened, and distressed in response to their calls. One of the complainants was an elderly hearing-impaired person registered with the TPS who had been unable to hear most of the call, where another individual was mis-sold two subscriptions and required a family member’s help to arrange a refund.

You can reach further information here.

Kind regards,

Zumbul Attorneys at Law

info@zumbul.av.tr