FEDMA calls for industry support because brands’ capacity to reach out to customers and prospects is being challenged.
What happened?
A fair and balanced processing of data for sponsoring is heavily fined.
The Tennis Association in the Netherlands (non-for-profit) forwarded their members’ names, gender, postal addresses to a sponsor so as the sponsor may promote its products or services to the members (some were tennis related, others not) by postal mail. The association equally shared the same data with, in addition, the data of birth, to another sponsor for telemarketing. The telemarketing campaign was cancelled, and the direct mail campaign continued. On March 3, the Dutch Data Protection Authority published their decision to fine the Dutch Tennis Federation €525.000.
Why is this special?
A new approach is taken by the Dutch DPA regarding the legal grounds of:
For the members who joined the tennis association prior to 2007, they were informed that the data collected was for the purpose of fulfilling the membership agreement. To share the data with the sponsor, the Tennis Association demonstrated that the purpose of generating revenue through sponsoring was compatible with the original purpose of fulfilling the membership agreement. The Authority stated that the Federation had broken the rules of the GDPR as the use was incompatible with original gathering of those data. Consent was necessary.
The Dutch Tennis Federation has always used legitimate interest as the legal basis for the transferring of the personal data to its sponsors. Now, the Data Protection Authority, in its decision, states that the Tennis Federation, even though they had informed the membership and given the members the chance to opt-out, needed a consent from each member in order to transfer the data to the sponsors.
Why should you be concerned?
What we need now is for the whole industry to act! We call for synergies to ensure:
For further information, you can refer to FEDMA position paper.
You can find here the PDF of this call for industry support.
You can find here the link the Dutch case (available in Dutch only). You can find here an unofficial summary of the case in English.
FEDMA team is available via email at info@fedma.org
To discuss FEDMA Membership, please contact rdewouters@fedma.org or book an introductory call via Microsoft Bookings.
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