Yesterday a Facebook reader got in touch with us to complain that he was refused the sale of a TV set when he declined to give his details for TV Licensing purposes.
According to him, the incident happened a few days ago at a Currys store in Shrewsbury. He is certain he was told the information was for TV Licensing rather than warranty purposes. The store assistant may have been wrong about that, but the damage was already done and he decided to take his business elsewhere.
Readers are reminded that there is no longer any legal requirement for retailers to report the sale or lease of TV receiving equipment to TV Licensing. No retailer should be harvesting data on behalf of TV Licensing as there are clear data protection implications by doing so. You can read more about this in an earlier post.
Anyone challenged to provide information for TV Licensing should refuse to do so and instead take their business to a more responsible retailer.
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3 comments:
"Anyone challenged to provide information for TV Licensing should refuse to do so and instead take their business to a more responsible retailer."
Alternatively, Should You choose to do so, You are free to provide the following details to the said retailer:
Name = Anthony Hall
Address = Broadcasting House, London
Postcode = W1A 1AA
Ensure You pay for the TV in cash
:-)))))
Wonder if the Orwellian TVL database is GDPR compliant ready for nest year, and TVL will comply with the needing permission to process someones data? No I thought not, hopefully they will get a heavy fine when someone complains about their threatograms resulting from soeone legally license free getting said letters.
Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen.
Let's take it one step at a time. GDPR is less of a complete change and more of an incremental update to some areas of the DPA and addition in other areas. So, for example, the standards for giving consent are higher, so failing to opt-out/untick no longer gives consent.
However consent is only one of the several allowed justifications for processing and storing data. One other justification is essentially law enforcement. In my personal opinion, the way TVL/Crapita uses people's data is not compliant with this.
However, even if there was a genuine non-compliance issue, the only body that would be able to hand out a fine would be the Information Commissioner's Office, which has previously shown its willingness to be soft on serious data failings (such as only imposing a fine of £100,000, a fifth of the maximum they can, when TalkTalk totally screwed up). The ICO and in particular the Information Commissioner herself have both stated that they're willing to be lenient in the case of mistakes - and TVL is bound to claim it made a mistake if action were taken against it.
Then of course we come to the whole 'establishment' thing - TVL/Crapita are so used to having their fingers in every pie and giving out brown envelopes that's it's unthinkable they'd ever get a fine, let alone a big one.
In all, as much as they deserve it, there's little prospect of TVL/Crapita/the BBC getting any kind of action taken over their reckless and malicious behaviour and policies.
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