EE, Vodafone and O2's joint venture Weve could cause a privacy stir

Sooraj Shah
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Is the joint venture between the UK's biggest telcos going to cause a customer backlash, and is it against the law?

But there is always the danger that the "opt-in" is located in small print with a checkbox, with wording that is not transparent to the average consumer. But according to Weve's head of wallet, Timo York, the company has been transparent.

"We are very clear on the privacy of data; the mechanism of how the data is used; how the consumer can opt out; we're good at working with the legal team, working with users and customers themselves in embedding in the right thing - if you do it properly and carefully then I don't think you can get to a point where you are [overstepping the mark]," he said.

Weve CEO Sear added: "What we're doing is to be absolutely upfront with consumers in marketing the proposition, making crystal clear what it is they will be receiving."

According to Sear, the firm has spent a lot of time and money to create a platform that stores the data of the 22 million customers that have already opted-in. They've given varying levels of permission which Weve takes into account and their identity is kept separately, he said.
Sear admitted that data from the mobile payments side of the business will eventually feed back to the advertising part of the business.

"At some point it will, but I think it may have been overstated that it's going to happen three weeks next Tuesday, we have to be realistic about it," he explained.

The question is, with the huge amount of data available to the telcos, and shared with partners like MasterCard or customers like Tesco - can't an "anonymous" user's data be identified using different data sets?

"No," Sear insisted. "Not until the consumer says ‘yes I'm ok with that, I'll log into this retail website and they will identify me'."

But it is not impossible for, say, Tesco to use data from its loyalty cards, insurance or banking services and match them with the "anonymised" data they get from the telcos. If this were to occur, Bevitt explained that the service would then come under the Data Protection Act because the data would then be deemed personal.

"You can't be sure [that Tesco is not doing this]; that might be a challenge to [Weve] and something that regulators might be interested in to make sure these two potential marketing sources are distinct and if they are not distinct then the appropriate safeguards and steps are taken in relation to all of the personal data," she said.

But Gartner's Casper believes that companies obtaining more data and using it to their advantage is nothing new - adding that for consumers it is a scalability issue rather than a privacy one.

"If you go back 500 years, when people lived in a village and went to a local food store and to the pub on the corner and you knew everybody and everybody knew what you ate for lunch and who you went to be with, there was no privacy - it's the same now but it's not a local village it is a global village.

"There are a lot of benefits to it, but there is a lot of risk too - if anything goes wrong [such as a data breach], it is not just a local village's problem, it is a global village's problem," he said.

If the relevant company suffered a data breach, then in certain circumstances of "distress" an individual could even sue, according to Bevitt.

She believes that Weve is just "testing the waters" with privacy legislation. The hope for the three telcos - who claim to cover 80 per cent of the UK's mobile population - is they don't end up like Phorm.

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