Tesco have now responded to our data protection request. They’ve sent through a 13 page letter which includes printouts and screen shots from their various systems. Unfortunately, they haven’t provided me with an electronic copy of anything, so I’d have to retype everything in order to use the data for anything useful. [...]
While we’re still waiting for a full response from Tesco, I wanted to tell you about a Data Protection Request that went right.
At the same time as making the original Tesco request, I also sent out a few other requests to some smaller businesses. Included amongst this group was a business that used to sell [...]
This weekend I received a letter from Tesco, apologising for the loss of my original letter. In it they say that “despite extensive investigations, we are unable to find any trace of your letter”. This doesn’t do much to ease my concerns – there is still a letter with a copy of my driving license [...]
Yesterday I spent a bit of time on the phone to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to find out what to do next. The person I talked to seemed quite concerned that they have lost the letter I sent them – and believes I am right in assuming it is in itself a breach of [...]
Tesco didn’t call be back, so I called them. As expected, I was passed from department to department (and even ended up speaking to the Caretaker for their Dundee office at one point), however, I finally got a straight answer from them. It appears that my letter was received and was sent to another office, [...]
It appears that our request has hit a wall before it’s even started.
I contacted Tesco today to ask why they hadn’t been in touch to confirm my identity. They had no record of the letter arriving. After showing them the Royal Mail proof of delivery and a bit of toing and froing, it appears that [...]
The letter to Tesco was sent by recorded delivery on 14th August 2009. Tesco signed for the letter on 15th August. They now have 40 days to respond to the request.
We’ve reproduced the text of the letter below (with some identifying elements removed).
As we are all well aware, everytime you purchase something from a supermarket (or any other place for that matter), information about the purchase is recorded. Sometimes, this data contains information that means it can be traced back to you. This especially happens if you use a loyalty card such as Nectar or Tesco Clubcard. [...]
On Wednesday (5th August 2009) I attended TJam – a Tesco event to unveil the latest version of their experimental API. The event was hosted at Microsoft’s London offices, and was attended by developers from all over the UK.
The aim of the event was to show off the latest beta of their API and let [...]