Lesson 9
Getting Off the Lists
Use your UK data rights in the right order: find out what a company holds, tell it to stop marketing to you, ask for erasure where it fits and leave the lists you can leave once.
Where your name came from
A glossy catalogue arrives, addressed to Ola by name, from a company she has never heard of. Somewhere, her name and address got onto a list. The usual routes are dull ones: a competition entry, a warranty card, a shop that shares with “carefully selected partners”, the open version of the electoral register, and data brokers, companies that collect and sell lists of people. People-search sites are brokers that publish what they find.
The tools in this lesson are rights under UK data protection law; other countries’ rules differ. You can’t clear out a cupboard you can’t see into, so they come in an order: ask what’s in it, tell them to stop using it and ask for it to be emptied, each for its own reason.