Bounty pregnancy club fined £400,000 for illegally sharing 14m people’s personal data

It included information on 'potentially vulnerable' new mothers and children and appears 'to have been motivated by financial gain”, says regulator

Bounty, which provides free samples, vouchers and guides to new parents, compiled personal data and shared it with 39 other organisations (Getty/iStock)

Pregnancy club Bounty UK has been fined £400,000 for illegally sharing the personal information of 14 million people in an “unprecedented” case.

Bounty, which provides free samples, vouchers and guides to new parents, compiled personal data and shared it with 39 other organisations, the Information Commissioner's Office said.

It included information on “potentially vulnerable” new mothers and children and appears “to have been motivated by financial gain”, the regulator added.

The company said it had reformed how it handles its members’ information.

“Bounty were not open or transparent to the millions of people that their personal data may be passed on to such large number of organisations,” said Steve Eckersley,the ICO’s director of investigations.

Bounty gathered information through its website and mobile apps, merchandise packs, and from the hospital bedsides of new mothers.

It then shared more than 34 million records with agencies including Acxiom, Equifax, Indicia and Sky.

Mr Eckersley added: “Such careless data sharing is likely to have caused distress to many people, since they did not know that their personal information was being shared multiple times with so many organisations, including information about their pregnancy status and their children.

“The number of personal records and people affected in this case is unprecedented in the history of the ICO's investigations into data broking industry and organisations linked to this.”

Jim Kelleher, Bounty's managing director, said: “In the past, we did not take a broad enough view of our responsibilities and as a result our data-sharing processes, specifically with regards to transparency, were not robust enough.”

The company has also ended its relationship with data brokers, Mr Kelleher said.

Bounty has previously been criticised for employing sales reps to target new mothers in their hospital beds shortly after childbirth.