The NAIH established that a violation of the law had occurred, but at the same time, it is conducting further procedures both in relation to the specific foreign mass SMS sending companies and the operators commissioned by the left. There is no indication in the report that the two threads are connected. After almost two years, it is still not possible to see clearly in the scandalous case.
They encouraged them to vote for the opposition in text messages
It should be remembered that the data protection authority received more than a hundred reports regarding the SMS campaign promoting the opposition before the elections. The whistleblowers objected that on March 29, 2022, they received unsolicited text messages with political content from three phone numbers to their personal mobile phone number.
The spam messages urged them to vote for the opposition. The sms without a sender also contained first names and names related to subscribers. The complainants objected that their telephone numbers, which were not included in the public telephone directory, were handled without their consent for the purpose of making unsolicited opposition political calls.
A NAIH initiated proceedings ex officio concerning the issue. The question is who, from what source, for what purposes and with what legal basis, the personal data of the large number of phone numbers called were handled for political purposes during the 2022 spring opposition campaign.
The connection is clear
According to the statement of Datadat GmbH, in the investigated spring period of 2022, a large number of orders were fulfilled for many customers, and all data was deleted after the order was fulfilled, so they could not identify the customer of the specific calls. According to the data protection authority:
“In addition to the companies DatAdat Professional Kft. and Datadat GmbH, according to the statements of Datadat GmbH, Datadat OÜ also participated in other political marketing campaigns that are currently not under investigation.
Although the merger was denied during the procedure, the domain and country code of the e-mail addresses of the employees of Datadat GmbH provided in the annex to the commission contracts is “@datad.at”, which is the same as the domain of the e-mail addresses used by DatAdat Kft. and Datadat OÜ and country code. In addition, the owners and managers of Datadat GmbH, DatAdat Kft. and Datadat OÜ also overlap.”
Another interesting thread is that the Márki-Zay’s Vásárhely Jövőjeért Egyesület commissioned NIB Research Kft. to carry out the campaign calls without specifically defining the persons to be contacted.
The contact details of the latter were provided by NIB Research Kft., obtained from a third-party private individual with an Austrian address, only for the duration of this campaign. This private individual with an Austrian address did not respond to NAIH’s inquiries. In this regard, the authority is investigating further.
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