Zoro, an online retailer known for its environmentally friendly shoes, has recently expanded its presence in Europe- Anxious to achieve market dominance, Zoro teamed up with another eco friendly company, TeraWorld, which sells accessories like belts and bags. Together the companies drew up a series of marketing campaigns designed to highlight the environmental and economic benefits of their products. After months of planning, Zoro and TeraWorld entered into a data sharing agreement to use the same marketing database, PromoChimp, to send the campaigns to their respective contacts.
Zoro and TeraWorld also entered into a data processing agreement with PromoChimp, the terms of which included processing personal data only upon Zoro and TeraWorld's instructions, and making available to them all information necessary to demonstrate compliance with GDPR obligations.
Zoro and TeraWorld then procured the services of a company called E-List. a marketing optimization firm that uses machine learning to help companies run successful campaigns. Clients provide E-List with the personal data of individuals they would like to be targeted in each campaign. To ensure protection of its clients' data. E-List implements the technical and organizational measures it deems appropriate- E-List works to continually improve its machine learning models by analyzing the data it receives from its clients to determine the most successful components of a successful campaign. E-List then uses such models in providing services to its client-base. Since the models improve only over a period of time as more information is collected, E-List does not have a deletion process for the data it receives from clients. However, to ensure compliance with data privacy rules, E-List pseudonymizes the personal data by removing identifing information from the contact information. E-List's engineers, however, maintain all contact information in the same database as the identifying information.
Under its agreement with Zoro and TeraWorld, E-List received access to PromoChimp, which included contact information as well as prior purchase history for such contacts, to create campaigns that would result in the most Views of the two companies' websites. A prior Zoro customer, Mr Paige, received a marketing campaign from E-List regarding Zoro's as well as TeraWorld's latest products. While Mr Paige recalls checking a box to receive information in the future regarding Zoro's products, he has never shopped TeraWorld, nor provided his personal data to that company.
