Junk Mail: Addressed to "The Owner"

miak said:

I once had a temp job working in an insurance company and one of my many mind numbing jobs was to put different leaflets advertising home insurance or similar in to envelopes and post them out. When I enquired as to where they got all these names and addresses (my junk mail came complete with name) I was told that they were able to get the names and addresses of people who had recently secured planning permission and that they were entitled to do so under the Freedom of Information Act.

These names were supplied to us from somewhere else, they were not sourced in the office and so anybody who called the office to ask that they no longer receive such mail were effectively wasting their time.

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I'm pretty sure that such practices would be in breach of current data protection legislation.

It happens a lot though, I recently applied for planning and recieved unsolicited mail from Century homes and Cygnum.

The firm that I worked for seemed pretty sure that they were entitled to do what they were doing and that they were operating by virtue of some loophole in data protection legislation. I'm not saying they were entitled to do so but certainly they were not secretive or discrete about sending these mail shots out.

The names and addresses of people involved in planning permission cases are available on the Web for all the world to see. Therefore your name and address is in the public domain, and there are no data protection issues.

Anyone can pull the names and addresses off the website (you don't even need to register for an account).

One could question whether the planning authority has the right to publish the names and addresses on the Web, but I'm sure they do, isn't part of the planning process a requirement for the process to happen in public, through newpaper statements, and posted signs.

It would be an interesting case for someone to take, to try and have their name and address witheld from public notices about planning issues.

-Rd

The form for removing your name from the junkmail list explicitly says it can't do anything about stopping mail where there's no actual name ('the owner', 'the occupier' etc.) Also, the people whose names are being blocked are meant to sign the form.

Not being able to block the address is a real pain for me because I live in an ex-rental place and the million and one tenants before me seem to be on every mailing list in existence. Try blocking all those names!

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