Two more data protection faux pas in a day
Howard Lake | 27 April 2003 | News
After our recent mention of one of the Institute of Fundraising regional groups’ error in publishing their e-mail newsletter subscribers’ e-mail addresses to everyone on the list, UK Fundraising has today received in e-mail format two similar breaches of data protection legislation from the fundraising community.
The first comes from a hospice in Berkshire, whose press officer included all the names and e-mail addresses of the media organisations receiving the news release.
The second comes from Philanthropy UK. Ironically their message was about “e-mail relay problems.” They compounded their problems by sharing the names and e-mail addresses of dozens of the newsletter’s recipients. So, now we know the e-mail addresses of Charity Commissioner Julia Unwin, Peter Wheeler, Jennifer Moses, Nicholas Baring, and a whole range of other influential or wealthy people. We suspect they didn’t give permission to have these details broadcast so, we won’t share them.
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Understanding the function of the different fields within an e-mail message, in particular the Cc. and BCc. fields is clearly exposing many voluntary sector organisations to at best some public ribbing from UK Fundraising and at worst a complaint under Data Protection legislation.
UK Fundraising’s Howard Lake has covered this and other issues in many of his online fundraising training courses since 1995. The next training course on using e-mail to fundraise takes place in London on 27 June 2003.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.