Bouygues Telecom is accused of spying on its customers via its emails
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The consumer association e-Watchers has just pinned Bouygues Telecom on its business practices. Through its emails, the operator would collect the personal data of its customers.
In Arcep’s last report, the operator was praised for the quality of customer service. In view of the revelations made by the e-Watchers association, this beautiful picture will darken in the coming days. By means of a tweet, Morgan Schmiedt, founder of the association confirmed the filing of a complaint. These are the emails sent to subscribers of Bouygues Telecom which are incriminated.
Bouygues Telecom would send pixel tags within its emails
The association discovered the presence of web beacons in emails sent to its subscribers. The goal would be to spy on the behavior of subscribers when opening messages. In total, this would potentially be 22 million people monitored by the operator. For this breach of GDPR regulations, e-Watchers has just filed a complaint against Bouygues Telecom with the CNIL. The outcome of a potential would be devastating for the operator if it is doomed. Indeed, some gray areas remain.
I have filed a complaint with the @CNIL vs @Bouygues Telecom for including tracking pixels in emails sent to subscribers. https://t.co/zDp7nrkkSO
– Morgan Schmiedt (@Morgan_Schmiedt) August 11, 2021
According to the analyzes published on its site, e-Watchers suspects the operator of outsourcing all this data to the attention of specialized companies. However, it is still necessary to prove this. If the data collected is used for commercial purposes, the sentence should be heavier. The first advanced elements identify the destination of the tracking pixels used. These are Google Analytics and Weborama, two companies specializing in online advertising campaigns.
The association’s requests are fairly straightforward. The removal of spyware, better information from Bouygues Telecom on the collection of personal data and the deletion of data already collected. Analysis of these emails indicates that the operator failed to anonymize the collected IP addresses. At the time of writing, the company has yet to react.
Source: e-Watchers
