The Italian regulator ordered Wind Tre to pay €16.7 million and Iliad, which operates under the Free brand, €800,000.
Wind Tre, whose CEO is Jeffrey Hedberg, was fined by the Italian Data Protection Authority for illegally processing data for promotional activities via SMS, email, fax and by phone conducted without users’ agreement.
No brakes
The Authority found many cases where customers could not stop their information being used for marketing and instances of personal data being displayed in public directories without permission.
Wind Tre’s apps MyWind and My3 obliged users to provide consent over and over again for different reasons, like profiling and communication to third parties. Customers could only withdraw permission 24 hours later.
The Authority also discovered what it described as “several serious offences” by the operator’s commercial partners, such as illegal collection of information by call centres.
Wind Tre is banned from processing data without consent, and must put in place technical and organisational mechanisms to control its partners’ supply chains.
Iliad Italia was fined because the Authority find faults in the means employees used to access network traffic data.