Parenting club Bounty has been fined £400,000 – noted as one of the largest penalties, for sharing its data with marketing agencies without users consent or permissions.

Bounty are available in nearly every NHS maternity ward nationwide. They provide free maternity packs when you sign up to their services, with offers available with other companies.
Bounty have a mobile app and a website which both display these offers and also offers support across the platforms in relation to pregnancy and motherhood aspects.

In the data breach which occurred a few years ago, the data released to third party data brokers such as: Acxiom, Equifax and Sky, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said.

The information that was transmitted without consent included:

• Full names of mother
• Full address of the user
• Email addresses
• Telephone numbers
• Due date of users baby/Date of Birth
• Sex of users baby

According to the Guardian: From June 2017 to April 2018 Bounty shared approximately 34.4m records with 39 organisations, the company admitted.
The unlawful sharing was aggravated by the personal nature of the information about potentially vulnerable new mothers or mothers-to-be, and very young children, including the date of birth and sex of a child. Because the data sharing ended before the introduction of the European general data protection regulation (GDPR), the potential fine was capped at £500,000.

If you are a member of Bounty or if you used to be; your personal details could be at risk. Angelus Law can assist you with a data breach claim due to the breach events that have occurred and outlined above. Contact a member of our team to continue with a claim.