Sounds like it's still an acceptable cost of doing business.
It's a first-time fine. It goes up roughly 10x if they do it again.
ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
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Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#12> As part of this investigation, it was also discovered that the company continued to contact some individuals even after they had requested this to stop.
If the messages had an opt-out mechanism that worked, they likely would have gotten away with the other things.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#13ICO's pricing of spam doesn't seem very well thought out.
For one, there's a lack of enforcement on this tax. Many customers get away with sending spam while evading payment. ICO is in the business of selling forgiveness, so they need to catch people.
Then the pricing structure is strange. In a given time period, spam can be taxed up to a maximum of 500k, but there is no limit on the amount of spam you are allowed to send.
This benefits larger players, as long as your spam operation scales profitably beyond the fixed cap of the tax's pricing structure.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#14> As part of this investigation, it was also discovered that the company continued to contact some individuals even after they had requested this to stop. If the messages had an opt-out mechanism that worked, they likely would have gotten away with the other things.
It’s funny how the opt out mechanisms are the buggiest part of all the systems in a company. And the slowest.
I had a message the other day: “We will try our best to unsubscribe you within 30 days”. Well, don’t strain yourselves
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#15HelloFresh seems to be optimising for user count above all else (incl profit).
They keep offering their big -40% loss leader promos to people that cancelled. Must be costing them an ungodly amount.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#16> Grocery Delivery E-Services UK Limited
Very transparent
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#17HelloFresh also sends marketing snail mail if they have your postal address. The market starts to be crowded and they are obviously aggressively marketing their product. We'll see if that can last. It's crazy that they got $367 million in total funding for a recipe and ingredients (meal kits) subscription business but they apparently now have 6 billion euros in revenue so it seems to work.
The service is really good. But very little to differentiate it from any of the other services with the result that when we used it we just swapped between whichever service give us a discounted offer. We could keep it up for months on end without paying the full subscription price.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#18Man I wish no private corp was allowed to contact you without an opt-in. Would really make email useful again....
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#19HelloFresh seems to be optimising for user count above all else (incl profit). They keep offering their big -40% loss leader promos to people that cancelled. Must be costing them an ungodly amount.
There's no way they are losing money at 40% off unless they are doing something unreasonably bad.