I have heard from people in the industry that trading of customer data is the norm in various sectors of marketing, retail and mobile networks. It is still shocking to see this in the news:

Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers.

It seems that the company itself alerted the Information Commissioner once they discovered this. Christopher Graham, who has been recently appointed as the IC, has called for prison sentences for those trading such data.

I am keen to go much further and close down the entire unlawful industry in personal data.

Sounds good, provided the definition of unlawful is customer friendly.

This is the other side of the bad coin of personal data – which is itself imprisoned in various silos and platforms. There are quite a few online that have more than ‘custodial’ overtones – Models of Data Imprisonment.

Tags: customer data, Information Commissioner, prison, t-mobile, trade