<
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/07/commonwealth-bank-fined-a-record-355m-for-breaching-spam-laws-with-millions-of-emails>
"The Commonwealth Bank has paid a $3.55m fine for breaching spam laws in the
largest penalty of its kind in Australia’s history.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority announced on Wednesday the
fine had been levied against the bank after it sent 65m emails to customers
which breached the Spam Act. More than 61m of the marketing emails unlawfully
required customers to log in to unsubscribe.
New regulations came into effect in April 2021 requiring marketers to allow
users to unsubscribe from emails easily, without needing to log in.
Most of the breaches occurred after CBA updated its electronic banking terms
and conditions in November 2021, which inadvertently took out language the bank
had been using in communications to exempt itself from the Spam Act changes
while it was in the process of creating a direct unsubscribe link.
An unsubscribe link was also broken in 13 message templates that ended up going
to 4 million customers. Of those, 5,000 messages were sent to customers who had
tried to unsubscribe.
“The scale and duration of the breaches by the CBA is alarming, especially when
the Acma gave it early warnings it might have some issues and the steps it took
were ineffective,” said Acma’s chair, Nerida O’Loughlin. “The failure to fix
the issues shows a complete disregard for the spam rules and the rights of its
customers.”
A spokesperson for CBA said the company had been engaged with Acma around the
changes to unsubscribe and identified issues to the authority, which then
became the subject of investigation.
CBA’s group executive marketing and corporate affairs, Monique Macleod, said
the bank accepted the findings and apologised for the error."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
