Alert readers may recall our ongoing enquiry with the Scottish Conservatives and the Information Commissioner’s Office about what may or may not constitute a lawful and legitimate “petition”, if one is conducted over a period of several years (during which signatories may changes their opinions, or die) and is never delivered to its supposed recipient, but merely used as a data-harvesting device.
And excitingly there’s been a new twist.
We’re still awaiting a response from the Scottish Tories to our follow-up question from last month (detailed at the above link), but we’d also sought some clarification from our dear old pals the surrender-resistant shout-monkeys of Scotland In Union with regard to a couple of similar pseudo-surveys on their own shady spinsite.
Their response came in the form of some forwarded correspondence with the ICO, and it’s fair to say we were a touch surprised.
Yes, you’ve read that right. SIU’s “petitions” are designed never to be closed, and rather more curiously never to be sent to the Scottish Government. Rather than a list of named people objecting to a specified issue, SIU’s masterplan is to simply invent a number and insist – without providing any evidence – that that’s how many people support their viewpoint, or may have supported it several years earlier.
Their full letter to the ICO is below.
And this was the official response.
We’ve highlighted a passage in which the ICO suggests that SIU might perhaps check that signatories haven’t had a change of heart or alive-ness, but in the gentlest of advisory terms. It appears entirely unconcerned about the “petition” (a) running for an infinite period of time, and (b) not actually being a petition at all in any possible known sense of the word, and therefore being a collecting of data under false pretences.
Despite the claims on the page, no message will actually be sent to anyone.
So that’s some cracking news for anyone seeking to scoop up people’s details under the GDPR without fear of consequences – all you have to do is call your harvesting operation a “petition”, run it for as long as you like without sending it to the supposed or implied target, and you’re home free.
We’re sure the spammers of the world will have taken careful note.
