Prediction by phone, chat and SMS. The clairvoyance business may well be one of the oldest professions in the world, but it has been able to take the various technological turns with vigor. But it seems that respect for the regulatory dimension is lacking.
This is how the companies Cosmospace and Telemaque, which offer online clairvoyance services, have just been respectively sanctioned by the CNIL for having “excessively retained personal data, collected sensitive data without valid consent, and for having failed to comply with the rules governing commercial prospecting operations” indicates the Commission.
It must be said that personal data are very precious commodities for its services which promise to reveal personal facts to their clients without knowing them. In appearance. In 2022, the film Goutte d’or, for example, showed in detail how a psychic used the social network profiles of his clients to fuel very profitable conversations.
Database of 1.5 million people
It is therefore not so surprising that the controls carried out by the CNIL in 2021 in the IT systems of its two companies made it possible to reveal several shortcomings, “concerning the collection of sensitive data without prior and explicit consent (health data and data relating to sexual orientation in particular).
The CNIL specifies that “the database common to the two companies” contained “more than 1.5 million people”.
In addition, data retention period was considered excessive. Not to mention that prospecting messages were sent “to people who had not expressed their consent”.
“Systematic” call recording
Finally, the company Cosmospace “systematically recorded telephone calls”.
Cosmospace explained that it does this “to control the quality of the service and for training, to demonstrate the subscription and proper execution of the contract, to respond to legal requisitions and finally, for the purposes of safeguarding human life”. The CNIL mentioned that a sample of conversations and an alert to employees in the event of a problem were sufficient to accomplish this.
The Cosmospace company was fined 250,000 euros. The fine is 150,000 euros for Telemaque.
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