Sunday, May 17, 2015

Progress Part 2

After starting to get responses back from MJM support the picture had become clearer. Being nice with your SARs goes a long way - in fact if you were to be as rude and obstructive as most organisations receiving SARs are, a court would not look kindly on your summons.

So whilst they were being helpful I congratulated them on their approach and noted a couple of things to myself:
  1. The resume attached was from 2007
  2. When I went to their website and password-reset-logged-in I found contact and personal information also dating back to 2007
  3. Whilst writing this section of the blog post I checked to see if I could download the attachment again three months later....and I can; despite MJMs insistence that it would be removed in due course
 These simple facts completely countermanded the response statement; which I assume is partly a canned reply / policy statement. In short, it demonstrated a complete disregard for anything approaching respect for privacy or data. Have a look at this ICO guidance document if you don't believe me.

My Job Matcher did confirm that Manz Online (part of the RecSmart Recruitment Ltd fold) was the source. Of course not only had I never heard of them but I'd certainly be able to prove the lack of consent or chain of privilege from me to their databases.

Quick bit of research showed that Manz is based in Lahore and does not fall under the remit of the Data Protection Act (UK) or Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (EU). This is of course just conjecture but it would almost seem like the use of offshore lead generation firms was intentional to inflate subscriber numbers; which would mean a greater appeal to investors or other job seekers in the market perhaps. That is a rather pessimistic opinion but one that was suggested by another MJM spam-ee.

Of course 360 Resourcing are UK based and would therefore be under purview of DPA and PECR; had MJM acquired my details from someone like 360 I could then take action against both MJM and 360 after some investigation.

If you were in a similar situation with Manz Online feel free to get in touch with their director Zak Ahmed on Google+. It's a dead-end to the search for data sources.

On To Part 3 Or Back to Part 1