While the form filling that Headband is requiring of her victims is likely to be an exercise in focusing them on their dreams and away from reality and is therefore likely to be for their own consumption, it does make me wonder how much information she collects or already holds.
I once asked an FLP bot about GDPR/privacy and once I’d explained what GDPR was she immediately said ‘we are compliant’, the “we” being FLP HQ. Irrelevant, if they are independent business owners as they claim and if they are holding people’s private information in their own homes/on their own devices.
I’ve looked up a selection of the bots we discuss including Headband, Bloodsuck, Uber and Yawn, none of them are registered. Castle Worldwide Ltd is registered but I wonder whose data they’ve been sharing and who with - Fierce (unregistered), Ninja (unregistered) or Belief Coding Bot (unregistered)? I’ve taken the ICO questionnaire as a typical bot and the answer from that is that I should definitely be registered. The ICO recently fined a sole trader for breaches of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations; the smallest fine is, I believe, c.£2k. That’s a lot of collagen sales! The chances of them being caught out might be remote but they can’t assume that they fall outside the rules that apply to the rest of us.
So the day a disgruntled ex-bot who gets one too many requests to rejoin from, say, Headband and decides to complain about approaches or someone who gets pestered without being aware they have shared their data and complains to the ICO, what will Headband do? Go to Yawn? And then Yawn will try and intimidate the individual and when that doesn’t work she will go to FLP and FLP will say ‘you are an independent business owner’. And Nurse. What would she do?