There seems to be some confusion around this subject and I would like to get to the bottom of what's legal versus what's acceptable.
Simple scenario: a list broker wants to build email marketing lists for business. The public domain eg LinkedIn is a rich source of accurate email data, so they 'acquire' the data from LI (manually or via software scrape), and then make this data available to b2b clients for email marketing purposes.
Most list brokers assume this to be legal and acceptable, based on the UK PECR 'Corporate Subscriber' exemption to prior consent. I disagree.
The confusion stems from regulation 22(1) of PECR and the concept of 'corporate subscriber' and 'personal corporate email' (Section 145 of the ICO Direct Marketing guidance v2.0).
If we accept that [log in to unmask] is personal data (see section 142 of the ICO Direct Marketing guidance v2.0), then any email directed to that individual will be 'direct marketing'. We know direct marketing requires prior consent if sent to an individual, unless the 'address' we send it to belongs to a corporate subscriber.
So I agree, that [log in to unmask] falls outside of the PECR 22(1) requirement, but crucially not DPA.
So my question is, does obtaining personal data, from a publicly available web site like LinkedIn, constitute lawful and fair obtaining for the purpose of direct marketing?
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