Did they breach my data

[Belgianbuns]

So about 2 years ago I applied for a job at a company local to me. I didn’t take it any further at the time as the salary was considerably lower than expected. Fast forward 2 years and I am now the manager of a branch and this particular company is now one of my competitors. Today I received an email from the advising about a vacancy that they have that I might be interested in. But they didn’t only send it to me - they sent to about 50 other random people. All of our email addresses were visible - not BCC’d. On the list I noticed one of the ladies that currently work on my team - I am sure she would have seen my name as well. Not only this, but about an hour later I received another email but this time I was included in another batch of 50 recipients. My question is - is this a data breach? And also am I right to be upset that those on the list, including my colleague, know I was interested in a job there? What would you do?

I think this is very poor, and you should complain. They should report it to ICO, who will decide if it’s a breach. There would need to be a bigger “incident” or lots and lots of “incidents” like this from the same company for ICO to take any punitive action though.

Yes they did. Email addresses are one of the big "things" about GDPR and it's particularly important to keep them private.

You should inform them of the breach, and they should report it to the ICO themselves.

If you don't think they will, you can report it to the ICO yourself.

As recently-ex-GDPR-officer for my department... definitely a breach, definitely report it to the company and to ICO.

So I eventually managed to get through the manager this morning and she denied all knowledge of it. She gave me the directors phone number and I called her. She was surprised and said “oh wow yes definitely not good”. She said she would get back to me hasn’t! Not impressed. When I checked it went out to 110 people