Company using my email without permission

This topic has 10 replies, 9 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 4 months ago by Mark Turner.

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November 13, 2018 at 10:56 pm #28254
Tippon
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@tippon
Forumite Points: 0
Three years ago I bought a top for Ellen through Ebay. This month I’ve had an email from the shop with the usual advertising crap. They’re now a ‘proper’ online shop. I had no direct contact with the company, and gave no permission for them to use my contact details. As it was through Ebay I didn’t think they had my email address anyway.

Would I be right in thinking that this is naughty of them, and possibly breaching Ebay’s terms as well as maybe data protection (they’ve held my details for three years)?

I’m in a bad mood tonight, and a bit of fire and brimstone vengeance would go down nicely (well, sending a sarcastic email anyway 😀 )
November 14, 2018 at 9:36 am #28276
Dave Rice
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@ricedg
Forumite Points: 7
Just ask them to take you off their list.
November 14, 2018 at 10:32 am #28277
Richard
Participant
@sawboman
Forumite Points: 16
While I agree with Dave, the best way is to simply tell them no more thank you:, surely the get out is that a company with a prior history of contact can claim that it is only keeping in touch without breaking any law? On the other hand, any contact prior to GDPR might need some degree of revalidation of the contact. Could this not also be subject to the fact that since you are an Ebay user and since after the GDPR came in, their permissions could still apply, so perhaps no offence has been committed?
November 14, 2018 at 11:11 am #28279
Drezha
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@drezha
Forumite Points: 0
Richard wrote:

On the other hand, any contact prior to GDPR might need some degree of revalidation of the contact.

Judging from the amount of emails before it came in, asking to be kept on the mailing list, I assume that this was a requirement or was at least something companies were covering themselves with.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett
November 14, 2018 at 4:52 pm #28290
Bob Williams
Participant
@bullstuff2
Forumite Points: 0
I get this with Brightview, a children’s and young person’s Toy and Science site. They were deaf to my pleas to take me off the database, then Youngest gdaughter took a look and realised there were some tasty Maths, Art & Science stuff on there. (She is a polymath)

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.
November 14, 2018 at 6:11 pm #28294
Dave Rice
Participant
@ricedg
Forumite Points: 7
Doesn’t much matter what happened before, you have (and always have had) the right to cancel. Indeed each email should have a link in it to do just that.
November 14, 2018 at 7:47 pm #28296
Spedley
Participant
@spedley
Forumite Points: 2
I get this too. I have my own domain (about £10 per year) and so I’ve set all email to be delivered to my personal address. This means I can use a different email address everytime I register and therefore any emails I get I know [almost] exactly where they’ve come from.

e.g. my email for forumite is forumite.co.uk@mydomain.com and this gets delivered to me.

my spam folder contains mail from stanleysonline, facebook and dropbox – not them directly but they have shared my email address with 3rd parties.

i7 4790s / 8GB / 480GB SSD / GTX 980 / 34" UltraWide : i3 4170 / 8GB / 480GB SSD / GTX 770 / 24" Samsung : i3 4130 / 8GB / 500GB Spinner / GTX 1050 / 23" Acer : Q9550 / 8GB / 1TB Spinner / GTX 580 / 22" Acer : i7 720QM / 8GB / 1TB+2TB+500GB Spinners (server) : i5 4570 / 8GB / 60GB SSD / 1TB / GeForce 210 / 22" Dell It's getting warm in here!
November 14, 2018 at 9:02 pm #28298
D-Dan
Participant
@d-dan
Forumite Points: 6
GDPR requires people to give permission. Existing permissions when GDPR was introduced endured. It’s likely that you already gave permission and forgot.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.
November 14, 2018 at 11:30 pm #28299
Tippon
Participant
@tippon
Forumite Points: 0
Dave Rice wrote:

Just ask them to take you off their list.

Where’s the fun in that? 😉

D-Dan wrote:

GDPR requires people to give permission. Existing permissions when GDPR was introduced endured. It’s likely that you already gave permission and forgot.

Nope. They were an Ebay shop, and I’ve had no reason to ever get in touch. I keep my shopping emails locally, so I’ve still got everything from back then, and there’s no contact other than through Ebay.
November 15, 2018 at 9:28 am #28303
Ed P
Participant
@edps
Forumite Points: 39
Iirc when there was a huge furore about the difficulties in applying GDPR the Information Commissioner stated that there was no requirement to do anything where there was an existing customer relationship.

The only one I really object to is SurveyMonkey (a US company widely used by UK Government bodies). The company appears to be acting as an intermediary for surveys. I have tried a couple of times to exercise my GDPR rights to stop them amalgamating my data across sites but just get lost in web-page redirections.
November 15, 2018 at 11:18 pm #28318
Mark Turner
Participant
@turner74
Forumite Points: 12
My work email is being spammed to death by a lot of newly created domains that I know I have never signed up to eg @racecar.online and tons of other different @something.something they all get junked but my inbox seems to get filled up with loads of these types of emails. I get the feeling if I click the unsubscribe link it will get a whole lot worse as some of the different domain ending are effectively pushing the same shit email. Same email different domain.

Mark
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