Germany: PayTV channel Sky has to pay a 250.000 Euro data protection fine

Germany: PayTV channel Sky has to pay a 250.000 Euro data protection fine

Sky is a paid TV broadcaster (Pay-TV) and has operated several times illegal telephone advertising campaigns for a corresponding subscription. The German Federal Network Agency received over 1,000 complaints about this.

Sky has commissioned an external call center company for this prohibited telephone advertising. Wring information was given regarding the consent of the affected people.

The pay-TV broadcaster also presented fake evidence and claimed that those affected had participated in raffles by the companies First Online Trading GmbH and Flow Factory Solutions GmbH and thus given their consent for telephone advertising. However, the Federal Network Agency’s investigations made it clear that these allegations were incorrect and that the websites of these companies were not visited by those affected, and that also no other consent was obtained.

Other violations of the General Data Protection Regulation were committed by the company Sky itself. In this case the affected people had given their consent to advertising, but they were revoked later. Nevertheless, these people were bothered with advertising calls, sometimes even several times a day. The affected people said that this actions by Sky were “telephone terror”.

The German Federal Network Agency therefore started a investigation against Sky in which it was determined that Sky did not have a suitable system for processing and documenting advertising revocations. The company thus violated Section 7 (2) of the German Unfair Competition Act (UWG).

Entscheidungsdatum:
23.12.2019

Land:
Germany

Art des Verstoßes:
violated rights of the data subject

Betroffene Datensätze:
> 1.000

Waren sensible Daten betroffen?:
No

verhängte Geldstrafe:
€ 250,000,-

Quelle:
Press release of the German Federal Network Agency (German)