In August this year I reported that the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) had effectively conceded it had no current powers to issue monetary penalties on spam texters. This was after the Upper Tribunal had indicated that in most cases the sending of such texts was not likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress (this being part of the statutory test for serving a monetary penalty notice (MPN) for a serious contravention of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003) (PECR).
What I’d forgotten were the reports of highly distasteful and in some cases highly distressing texts sent in May to festival-goers by the organisers of the Parklife festival in Manchester’s Heaton Park. The texts didn’t disclose that they were from the event organisers, but instead purported to come from “Mum” and were advertising extra events at the festival.
Regulation 23 of PECR outlaws the sending of direct marketing texts (and other direct marketing electronic communications) where the sender’s identity has been disguised or concealed.
As the Manchester Evening News reported at the time receiving the texts in question left many recipients who had lost their mothers distressed and upset.
And so it came to pass that, as the same newspaper reveals today, the ICO investigated complaints about the marketing, and appears to have determined that the sending of the texts was a serious contravention of PECR regulation 23, and it was of a kind likely to cause substantial distress. The paper reveals that an MPN of £70000 has been served on the organisers, and the ICO has confirmed this on its website, and the MPN itself lists a number of the complaints made by affected recipients.
So, I, and the ICO’s Steve Eckersley, were wrong – powers to serve MPNs for spam texts do still currently exist, although it must be said that this was an exceptional case: most spam texts are irritating, rather than as callous and potentially distressing as these. And this is why the Ministry of Justice is, as I have previously discussed, consulting on lowering, or dropping altogether, the “harm threshold” for serving MPNs for serious PECR contraventions.
The views in this post (and indeed all posts on this blog) are my personal ones, and do not represent the views of any organisation I am involved with.
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