Sky Betting and Gaming wins legal appeal over handling of personal data
The Flutter-owned brand appealed against a ruling that its marketing broke the law.
UK.- Flutter’s Sky Betting and Gaming (SBG) has won its appeal against a High Court judgment against it on the topic of marketing communications sent to a problem gambler. RTM v Bonne Terre Limited & Anor, in which the operator was accused of breaching data consent rules, will now return to the High Court.
Last year, the High Court had concluded that the claimant, referred to as RTM, had not provided “legally operative consent” for the collection of personal data. RTM later received direct marketing from Sky Betting and Gaming based on cookie tracking and data collection and went on to gamble with the operator between 2007 and 2019, ultimately losing £45,000.
Justice Collins Rice took the view that “consent is subjective not objective” and that RTM had been unable to give consent due to being a problem gambler. However, SBG immediately signalled its intention to challenge the ruling. The appeal saw the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) called on to advise the court on the interpretation of consent under data protection law.
The Court of Appeal has now overturned the original ruling. Lord Justice Mark Warby found that last year’s High Court verdict had relied on “a legally mistaken approach to the issue of what needs to be proved to establish that a data subject had ‘given consent’.”
The judge said that as a data controller SBG did “not have to prove what was actually in the mind of the individual data subject” at the time they indicated consent to data processing for the purposes of direct marketing. “It is neither necessary nor relevant for this purpose to explore whether the individual data subject was vulnerable, with an impaired ability to make fully autonomous decisions,” he said.
Flutter UK&I described the ruling as an important decision not only for Sky Bet but for the wider gambling industry.
