[Closed] Anyone have experience of Plusnet with regard to data protection?

Did you need to give specific permission or was this in the terms of service and privacy statement that you accepted?

without knowing the specifics there might not have been any passing of information. Its not uncommon for spammers and scammers to claim to be operating at the behest of your phone / mobile / broadband provider and it be nothing more than a lucky guess. Obvious if they guess wrong, not so obvious is they guess right.

I'm with Plusnet; have you been getting robocalls from a "London" number that changes each time and leaves a message in Chinese?

You know for certain that Plus Net are at fault? Being part of BT I would have thought they'd either be in control or covered by their Ts & Cs

A friend of mine certainly thought so. He gave Plusnet an e-mail for contact that was specific to them (think <person>-plusnet@mail.com or similar) and then started getting a lot of marketing crapspam.

From memory, they insisted they had not given his details to anyone, but he is really not convinced.

Thanks for the comments folks. Plusnet denied passing my details on to a marketing company. Said marketing company called again today and I answered, mentioned the ICO then, funnily enough, they didn't want to talk to me after all.

A bit of a coincidence with my contract coming to an end in the next couple of weeks. Google throws up plenty of results for the phone number used with Plusnet claiming that folk hadn't unticked a particular box. The first thing I did in any case was to double-check my marketing preferences hence my annoyance.

Will inform the ICO although they can be pretty toothless when it suits them. Having previously had a similar experience with a data breach, I can only assume that it's another case of a dishonest employee harvesting data. Really boils my wee, sorry.

same here bruise W. number changes every time, cos i block it every time!

It's easy enough to find out - ask Plusnet who they pass your details to and the marketing company where they got them from. You're entitled to the answers within a month.

When they don't complain to the ICO. Who will, in all likelihood, put it on the pile with the 5 million other complaints that they're ignoring but might send a letter.

same here bruise W. number changes every time, cos i block it every time!

I get this chinese call from London and a UK mobile as well and also block it every time.  Should be reported to offcom...

It’s easy enough to find out – ask Plusnet who they pass your details to and the marketing company where they got them from. You’re entitled to the answers within a month.

ajaj Plusnet told me they don't pass on any details, I kicked up a stink last week. Frankly am absolutely sick of the lies that get spun by companies who know fine well they'll get away with anything cos the ICO are toothless and probably very selective.

The ICO may be selective, but toothless they most certainly are not. EE got fined £100k a month or two back for sending out marketing messages, BA got slapped for £300M over a data breach recently and there's been a bunch of others. ICO seems to be wanting to make sure that companies take their GDPR compliance seriously.

Thanks Cougar, some big fines there for sure. I guess like all public services they're overworked and understaffed together with a reduced budget. Anyway, they didn't do anything the last time I contacted them so 'scuse my cynicism!

The ICO took action against someone (sole trader) who had been spamming me for several years. Was in the form of advice and a written warning but did the trick.

They were and maybe still are hugely overworked and understaffed though. Plenty of their staff left before GDPR hit to work in the private sector for significant payrises. I hired one!

"Plusnet told me they don’t pass on any details,"

This isn't a very plausible answer. They are very open about passing details to Experian and Equifax, for example.