Competition Win Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSDs!

HandSauce?

 

No one is surprised by this, but on an absolute majority of other competitions or 'sign up' things, there is always the option to opt out of marketing artillery BEFORE your details go to get sold off to anyone who wants to buy them. Remember, if you retrospectively withdraw your consent, you can only withdraw it form Dennis, not the people they've already sold it to. You've got to retrospectively withdraw it from them individually as well. Quite annoying.

Some thoughtful and clever companies even give you options about what type of company/service/product you might be interested in, so as only to direct your details to those type of people that might actually offer something you would be interested in, rather than just pebbledash your details everywhere indiscriminately.

 

it is an UK company you know, most of the time its up to the part maker if its global or not and is partly dennis option as well

there are usa sites you know that well that only do usa only should I go and start complaining on there sites

 

Speaking of which, I used to frequent wow.allakhazam.com - which provided forums and for World of Warcraft. They decided to start a wiki to give everyone all the info that was needed - items, locations, etc. and the ran a competition to promote this, giving away daily and weekly prizes over a month-long period.

I won the one of weekly prizes, which was a Nintendo Wii, but was unable to claim it because I'm not a resident of the USA, so I know how you non-UK people feel. However, life's not fair and sometimes where you live means you're either eligible or ineligible for certain things.

 

What happened to competitions that didn't involve selling all your personal contact details without option? Oh wait, that's right; Dennis.

 

Always UK residents only .

 

But is it to cover using a third party to do their eshots? TBH I've done bit-tech related comps before and never received spam out of it.

 

Just to be clear, the law *doesn't* require BT to provide an opt-out option at the point of entry. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) provides 'guidelines' as to what they should do. They are required to provide a method to opt-out, but it doesn't have to be at the point of entry. However, Dennis is the only company (AFAIK) to not provide this option when you submit details.

I've personally had a bit of a hectic ride with Dennis. In the worst case, they took my details from some old competitions off the CPC website (back when they had an opt-out option on the entry page, which I'd used) and, sometime after CPC and Bit-Tech had merged, they sent me marketing emails to those addresses. I know it was Dennis because I use unique emails for just about everything I do, so I can accurately track the source of spam.

When I called them up on this and asked them to delete the details from their records, they deleted everything they had with my domain name, which included my active forum account. I just came to post one day and found there was no TWeaK on the forums anymore, and all my previous posts had been deleted.

To give Dennis some credit, they do have the Data Marketing Manager (Laura Paterson) responding to privacy@dennis.co.uk, usually within a week. You have to provide the details associated with your email address (I just give everything I give on the competition page ie name, address and phone number) but when they have deleted the info I don't get marketing.

However, on a few occasions I've had it happen that they have confirmed that they deleted all the info that I asked for, and they've only deleted some of it. As such, I've filed a complaint with the ICO, which hopefully I'll get a reply on soon.

 

This thread is hilarious.

You're all freaking out over something that wasn't difficult to figure out in the first place (UK Only), and then something that's trivial (Oh no, junk mails to your precious inbox!)

 

Heumm you did read properly. It's PHONE spam.

 

Direct telephone contact is pretty much dealt with through the Telephone Preference Service which ensures you don't get marketing by phone. This applies to mobiles and landlines but excludes text messaging. Postal mail spam is rare these days, so the only spam you're likely to get is email / text messaging.

 

Even then, I don't think they use text messages. Email is by far and above the cheapest method to send mass-marketing messages.

 

Well, since I only recently acquired a mobile (last week), I've yet to include the number on any online forms and haven't had any text spam, so I've got no experience to talk of there.

 

I am from the UK and I HAVE won a great prize (and I am not English)

 

Well done... I think? Have a biscuit...