When the direct marketing of products and services violates the right of citizens to privacy
Fani Davidova from AIP legal team comments on practices when direct marketing of products and services violates the right of citizens to privacy.
The lawyer gives examples of victims of direct marketing – phone offers for products and services, TV shows, even bank services. Specific provisions of the Bulgarian Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) are quoted which introduce obligations for the providers of such products and services and ensures that the right of privacy is protected:
• The sender of the product/services offer should be unambiguously identifiable in order for the rights granted by the PDPA to be exercised.
• The data collected from the targets of the direct marketing shall be processed for specific, precisely defined, and legal purposes, as stipulated by Art. 2, Para. 2 Item 2 of the PDPA.
• The physical person – recipient of the offer, has the right to know how and on what grounds the sender of the offer will process their personal data and shall give their explicit consent for such processing (Art. 4, Para. 1 of the PDPA). The most frequent violation in this regard is transferring registers of data once collected with the consent of the persons for specific purposes, but later transferred to third parties who use them for the purposes of direct marketing. In a Decision 72 as of March 23, 2010 the Commission for Personal Data Protection assumes that such transferring of data should happen only with the knowledge and consent of the concerned persons, otherwise the provision of Art. 4, Para. 1 of the PDPA is violated.
• The physical body – recipient of the offer, has the right to object against receiving such offers. In a case of a bank using data from a public register to send offers for its services, the Commission for Personal Data Protection assumed that the provision of Art. 34a of the PDPA is violated. The bank, in its capacity of personal data controller had processed the data of the targets of its direct marketing without informing them for their rights to object against processing of their personal data for the purposes of direct marketing as required by the provision of Art 34a, Para. 1, Item 2 and Para. 2 of the PDPA.
• The sender of such offers shall process personal data in compliance with the requirements of the PDPA.
The full text of the article in Bulgarian.