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ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
101–110 of 144 posts
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#102I receive a lot of physical mail from HelloFresh and there's no clear way to opt-out. I've never (willingly or knowingly) signed up to their service or any marketing bits.
I have a sheet of printed labels that say 'Return to sender, unsolicited mail' which I use for such instances. I am of the belief that the offending business must then pay to receive it back. Not really sure if this is true but it does seem to work in many cases since the amount of junk mail I get now is less than one a month.
That's a great idea! Pity it doesn't work for spam email - the cost part.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#103The worst about Hello Fresh is the subscription itself, you get meals every week, unless you opt-out. Of course that you will forget to opt out at some point, so they just send you 3 meals of their choice. No 'Hey, we will send you this, are you ok with it or do you want to change it?' Plus, the receipes aren't that good if you are an above average cook. You get something Indian and it is a gringo version of the real…
I tried Hello Fresh because of their "free" box promotion, and I have to say as a single person who lives alone, it was great to both have sensible portion sizes, and reducing the mental overhead of having to think about what to cook during weekdays, along the planning and shopping that comes with it. It's nice not to have to eat Bolognese for 4 days if you make one, since beef mince normally only comes in 500g sizes…
Not buying in bulk is always going to have more packaging. I bet the excessive amount is to prevent customer complaints about ruined ingredients.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#104The ICO has always been a bit of a wet blanket. Never really uses its powers effectively. From pathetic fines to putting out press releases about raids before they happen. £140k is just the cost of doing business with 79 million spam emails and 1 million spam texts.
Many companies just factor fines and legal costs into the bottom line.
HelloFresh might well have known they are overdoing it but just put some money aside to pay the fine - when it then comes.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#105It seems like they are basically selling papal indulgences on the cheap? Who gets the revenue they generate from absolving these companies of their sins?
That's a fantastic way of describing it. I will be using that from now on.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#106One week before the first lockdown - when most offices had sent their staff home - HelloFresh were knocking door to door on my street to flog subscriptions, not minding that they might have been spreading the virus.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#107This must be fake news.
We have been reassured hundreds of times by vocal HN posters that spam text messages are strictly an American problem, and that it never ever happens in the "civilized" world.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yesterday I created an account on John Lewis' website, and I was please to see that during sign-up, they had an unchecked "Tick here if you want our newsletter." Then, later I placed an order, and during credit card checks I noticed a "Tick here if you do NOT want our newsletter", which was of course unchecked and that's how the fuckers got me. Fuck this dark pattern, and fuck the Product Manager that requested it. T…
> There literally should be a law that says you cannot ask a user to check a box NOT to give away their data. There is!
Alright, I meant there should be consequences for doing so.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There literally should be a law that says you cannot ask a user to check a box NOT to give away their data. There is!
Alright, I meant there should be consequences for doing so.
There are, there have been a few GDPR fines. There should be more, though.
Re: ICO fines HelloFresh £140k for spam texts and emails
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, not sure it’s helpful for a regulator to bankrupt a business for sending too many emails. Spam email is pretty par for the course nowadays. This seems like a proportionate response to alert them to get a handle on it.
I'm not saying that bankrupting businesses is the best strategy, but it can be helpful. If you put fear into these companies that they can get wiped out at a moments notice they will smarten up really quick. If you show them that they will get a fairly cheap slap-on-the-wrist warning first they will ignore the rules until they get the first warning, then toe the line. So if you want the whole industry to follow the r…
HelloFresh made an honest mistake. It's the sort of mistake that anyone could have made. They had poor understanding of some fairly complex legislation and wrote an insufficiently clear opt-in statement. This led to some people who had consented to receive promotional e-mails instead receiving text messages, or emails of a type that they didn't expect based on the opt-in.
The regulator is fully satisfied that HelloFresh made an honest mistake, they're satisfied that they've taken adequate steps to fix the underlying problem, but the fine essentially says "you made a fairly minor mistake, but you're a big company and we expect better".
What you're proposing is an arbitrary and disproportionate punishment pour encourager les autres. It's the corporate equivalent of sending people to the gulags for littering. It doesn't work, it's hugely costly and it is (rightly) illegal in any country governed by the rule of law. You can't make people infallible through fear.