Data Protection

nipwater

I am Customer with Perlicio and they rang my home Phone and discussed my account with my 15 year old son. They informed him my direct debit had been returned and there was no money in my account..Surely this is a Breach of Data Protection..

the_syco

It depends: do both you and your son have the same name, and/or are you male as well?

Jev/N

I'm not 100% if it would be in contravention of such protections, it may be unethical but not illegal.

“personal data” means data relating to a living individual who is or can be identified either from the data or from the data in conjunction with other information that is in, or is likely to come into, the possession of the data controller.

nipwater

Both of us have different names and he told agent that he was my son

chris85

You could put in a complaint and they will investigate but i would imagine they said it so you would be aware the call was an account issue rather than a sales call.

For instance if i got a message to call my phone company i may be likely to consider it a sales call if there were no issues on my account and may not return the call but if it mentions my payment failing i will immediately call them and get the situation resolved.

gerrycollins

you could drop a line to the data protection commissioner and they can direct from there regarding this howver they could say that they thought they were talking to you.

foggy_lad

But the child said he was the son of the account holder. Perlico should not have spoken to anyone else about your account at all not even your wife unless she is listed as a contact person.

jor el

Before discussing any account info it would be a requirement for the agent to verify who they were talking to. This would be more than just asking for the person's name, and often include date of birth, mother's maiden name, alternate contact number or other details. There's no way they should have just started talking about the account, especially when the person identified himself as not being the account holder.

You can complain to Perlico first, http://www.perlico.com/info/codeofpractice.aspx and if not satisfied, you can escalate that to Comreg. The Data Protection Office is another avenue you could pursue.

El Camino

I'm sure this is actually quite a common issue across all industries that make outbound calls but as Jor El points out there should be some form of validation in place to ensure that they don't disclose personal data. You could always refer the matter to ComReg or more appropriately the Data Protection Commissioner but you're not likely to get much of an outcome as it will most likely be put down to a human error.

While it strictly would represent a breach of their requirements it's not something that's going to set off any alarms anywhere though. It's not on the same scale as losing laptops and all of that.

Aren't Perlico a subsidiary of Vodafone nowadays?

Our man in Havana

Aren't Perlico a subsidiary of Vodafone nowadays?

They sure are.

As regards the DPC, they will only do something if you demand they take action. Otherwise they do nothing.