Bounty Data Breach
Bounty is a parenting club which provides support and advice to new parents who sign up to use their services online/via their mobile app, or to people who are directly referred to them via a maternity ward.
The company admitted that between June 2017 and April 2018 they sold users information to third party data brokers like Equifax, Acxicom and Sky. They had no consent from any of their users to sell their personal details. Over 34 million personal records were shared with 39 different companies.
Bounty were fined the maximum amount (at the time) of £500,000 for the data breach.
Steve Eckersley, the ICO’s director of investigations, said the amount of data shared in the Bounty Data Breach was “unprecedented”.
“Bounty were not open or transparent to the millions of people that their personal data may be passed on to such large number of organisations,” Eckersley said. “Any consent given by these people was clearly not informed. Bounty’s actions appear to have been motivated by financial gain, given that data sharing was an integral part of their business model at the time”