Italian authorities issued a heavy financial penalty on Wind Tre for breaching data processing rules, with rival Iliad Italia also penalised, albeit to a much lesser degree.

The Italian Data Protection Authority ordered Wind Tre to pay €16.7 million for illegal data processing related to promotional activities made over SMS, email, fax and by phone conducted without user consent.

An investigation of the operator’s practices highlighted numerous cases where complainants were unable to exercise their right to object to their information being used for marketing purposes, the Authority explained. It also found cases where personal data was displayed in public directories without user permission.

Wind Tre apps MyWind and My3 were found to oblige users to repeatedly provide consent for different purposes including profiling and communication to third parties, with revocation possible only after 24 hours.

The Italian data privacy body also found “several serious offences” by the operator’s commercial partners, including illegal data collection by call centres.

Alongside the hefty fine, Wind Tre was banned from processing data without consent, and ordered to adopt technical and organisational measures to control its partners’ supply chains.

The Italian Data Protection Authority also ordered Iliad Italia to pay €800,000 after finding flaws in the ways employees accessed network traffic data.