Breast Cancer Campaign shares e-mail addresses
Howard Lake | 21 September 2003 | News
The latest charity to share our e-mail address without permission is Breast Cancer Campaign in its viral campaign for Wear it Pink day.
Breast Cancer Campaign is promoting its Wear it Pink day on 31 October 2003 via a range of media including e-mail. Unfortunately, the sender of today’s e-mail from the charity managed to share about the 150 or so names and e-mail addresses of all the recipients with everyone who received a copy.
UK Fundraising’s editor certainly didn’t give permission for his e-mail address to be shared publicly like this, so we assume all the other recipients did not either. Having been a joint speaker with solicitors Bates Wells and Braithwaite at a charity Internet briefing last Friday, we are pretty certain such misuse of our personal data contravenes data protection legislation.
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So, once again, we recommend that charities that give staff access to e-mail train them in the fundamental difference between the Cc and Bcc fields.
Breast Cancer Campaign is hardly the first charity to make this error – indeed, UK Fundraising regularly highlights such errors. We also cover this in our Internet fundraising training courses.
Still, we enjoyed the irony of Breast Cancer Campaign’s opening sentence in the e-mail: “Please forward this message to everyone you know.” No thanks, you’ve just done a very good at that already…
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.