GDPR and a company holding incorrect details with my address

oldman72

Sorry if this has been posted before.
I received a mailshot inviting me to fill in a reply paid form to get compensation for the mis-selling of car finance.
All very fine and good except the name on the address was Portugese/Spanish and had never lived here and we have been here 33 years.
I contacted the company and said this is totally spurious and I'd like to know the source of the data they held because someone could have been using my address for illicit purposes.
Their stock response was 'sorry. We have removed this information and have put a 'do not contact' against this address, but due to GDPR we cannot reveal the source.'
Is is valid for me to contact the ICO on this?

marcia_

oldman72 said:

Sorry if this has been posted before.
I received a mailshot inviting me to fill in a reply paid form to get compensation for the mis-selling of car finance.
All very fine and good except the name on the address was Portugese/Spanish and had never lived here and we have been here 33 years.
I contacted the company and said this is totally spurious and I'd like to know the source of the data they held because someone could have been using my address for illicit purposes.
Their stock response was 'sorry. We have removed this information and have put a 'do not contact' against this address, but due to GDPR we cannot reveal the source.'
Is is valid for me to contact the ICO on this?

 What for? They have acted appropriately and removed your address what more do you want? 

Isthisforreal99

oldman72 said:

Is is valid for me to contact the ICO on this?

Only if you are the type of person who takes pleasure in escalating such trivial matters.

user1977

You don't "own" your address. If it's somebody else's name on the account then it's their data, not yours.

Ergates

oldman72 said:

Sorry if this has been posted before.
I received a mailshot inviting me to fill in a reply paid form to get compensation for the mis-selling of car finance.
All very fine and good except the name on the address was Portugese/Spanish and had never lived here and we have been here 33 years.
I contacted the company and said this is totally spurious and I'd like to know the source of the data they held because someone could have been using my address for illicit purposes.
Their stock response was 'sorry. We have removed this information and have put a 'do not contact' against this address, but due to GDPR we cannot reveal the source.'
Is is valid for me to contact the ICO on this?

No, it wouldn't be valid for you to contact the ICO on this.

They were correct that they couldn't reveal the source of the data, because the data wasn't about you.

As someone else has pointed out - you don't own your *address* (You own the property *at* the address, but not the address itself), and an address is not, on it's own PII.  An address linked to a name *is* PII - but in this case, the name wasn't yours, so it's not data about you.

MyRealNameToo

oldman72 said:

Sorry if this has been posted before.
I received a mailshot inviting me to fill in a reply paid form to get compensation for the mis-selling of car finance.
All very fine and good except the name on the address was Portugese/Spanish and had never lived here and we have been here 33 years.
I contacted the company and said this is totally spurious and I'd like to know the source of the data they held because someone could have been using my address for illicit purposes.
Their stock response was 'sorry. We have removed this information and have put a 'do not contact' against this address, but due to GDPR we cannot reveal the source.'
Is is valid for me to contact the ICO on this?

Only if you want the ICO to confirm that you have no right to know. 

GDPR protects the data subject, you arent the data subject as you say you dont know of anyone of that name let alone one that lives at your address. 

All odds are it's someone just putting junk into a form to get through a process and your random address was selected.