Pregnancy club Bounty is fined £400,000 for illegally sharing the personal information of more than 14m new mothers and parents-to-be
- A watchdog investigation found Bounty sold records to dozens of companies
- The ‘careless’ breach of data is likely to have ‘distressed’ many mothers
- Almost 3.4million records about vulnerable mothers and children shared
Controversial pregnancy club Bounty has been fined £400,000 for illegally sharing personal information of more than 14million mothers.
A watchdog investigation found Bounty harvested vulnerable mothers’ data and sold it to dozens of companies without their consent.
The ‘careless’ breach trust is likely to have caused ‘distress to many people’ after 34.4million records about young children and pregnancies were shared to almost 40 organisations.
Controversial pregnancy club Bounty has been fined £400,000 for illegally sharing personal information of more than 14million mothers. Stock image
Bounty said it ‘acknowledged’ the The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) findings and had made changes to how data member was shared without knowledge.
The company is notorious for its hard-selling tactics to get new mothers to sign up to the parenting club from their hospital beds, often when they are still recovering from birth.
It offers promotional packs and professional newborn photography in hospitals ‘from the comfort of your maternity bed’.
But many did not know that Bounty was also a data broker supplying information to third parties, such as Sky and Equifax, that would use it to fine-tune direct marketing.
The company is notorious for its hard-selling tactics to get new mothers to sign up to the parenting club from hospital beds who are often still recovering from birth
Breaching the 1998 Data Protection Act, it shared personal information without being fully clear that it was being spread so widely.
Labour MP for Sheffield Heeley and Shadow Policing and Crime Minister Louise Haigh welcomed the fine, branding Bounty’s actions as a ‘shameful exploitation of new mums’.
Steve Eckersley, the watchdog’s director, said: ‘The number of personal records and people affected in this case is unprecedented in the history of the ICO’s investigations into data broking industry and organisations linked to this.’
Mr Eckersley said Bounty was ‘motivated by financial gain’ and they were not transparent to millions of people that their data would be passed on to other companies.
Jim Kelleher, Managing Director of Bounty said: ‘We acknowledge the ICO’s findings – in the past we did not take a broad enough view of our responsibilities and as a result our data-sharing processes, specifically with regards to transparency, were not robust enough.’
Bounty has now reduced the number of personal records retained and for how long they keep them and have ended relationships with the small number of data brokerage companies.