Could I continue the recent line of queries which have linked personal
experience of DP issues to professional use.
I recently applied for an account with a financial service. In signing the
papers I scored through the bit about agreeing to have my data passed on to
"other companies within the ... group", and noted that I did not wish to have
such marketing information.
I have now received a very touchy letter which (in my view, wrongly) takes
issue with my declining to say yes. I am told that "the reason for asking for
your consent is that the separate companies [in the Group] have their own
marketing databases... The Group is seeking to bring group data together... To
be able to transfer data to a central database the consent of customers is
needed, hence the declaration in the form..." I am then told that not only
will I miss out on special offers, etc, but that the first company itself will
not now be able to send me material.
Now, two things. First, I guess I can live without the info, but I still do
not see why a refusal to have data passed to other companies affects the first
one. Any central database should be able to deal with this.
Second, it reminded me that one of our own departments had checked a similar
issue with me earlier this year, when precisely setting out to regularise
existing databases. They asked if we needed to contact all existing names on
the various databases to check this apparent new compilation, and my advice was
that we didn't, since if we had collected the first data fairly, and we were
sure we had, then a basic improvement in the service did not require consent.
Would anyone see any problems with this (other than a complete change of
purpose, which would manifestly be wrong).
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Dr Trevor Field
Senior Assistant Secretary
University of Aberdeen
++44 (0)1224 272077
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