I’m not professing to be a data protection expert, and yes, I know this could sound like a dry subject for a post, for which I apologise.
Very recently I had cause to request that a company removed a previous review I had given for them. This was simply due to the fact that their service, in my opinion, had deteriorated badly.
The specifics and the parties are irrelevant to this post, they know who they are. I’m certainly not a person to take any glee in running others down, no matter how badly they behave. My mother always said, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”, and I tend to live by this adage, thus not expending my energy on negativity…
To explain, I engaged a company for their service, and initially all was going well, during the initial process they were engaged and were responsive. At this point they asked if I would leave a Google and Facebook review on their pages, to which I said I would be delighted.
Over the next months their service levels slipped (dramatically) to the point that they simply did not respond at all. So, I took the action to simply delete the reviews I had previously left (As I said, I’m not one to leave a negative review)
It then came to my attention that they had posted my name and company name on the reviews section of their own website, and to make matters worse they had actually grossly misquoted me!. None of the words were what I had said to them orally, nor what I’d written on the now deleted Google and Facebook reviews.
So, I politely messaged the owner and requested that they remove the entry on their site. By this time I had ceased to be a client and had moved my business elsewhere, and so legally I do not have any ongoing relationship with them.
I then received a barrage of messages stating that they were ‘entitled’ to continue to quote (misquote) me as a satisfied client ‘because I was at that time’ (For the record; no dates were included in the mock review).
Now, Google and Facebook as examples of understanding a customers rights are well aware of the rules in terms of ‘rights of erasure’ and ‘rights to be forgotten’, that’s why they provide the ability to edit and delete reviews and it’s built in to their review mechanism. As it is in TrustPilot, and any other review system.
This company though seemed to think this didn’t apply, stating that because I had been a satisfied client once gave them the right to continue to quote (misquote) me!
Needless to say, I was taken aback at this stance, especially when they sent me a long message quoting an obvious ChatGPT output justifying their stance, as though it was some sort of legal defence!
I’m actually still waiting for a final outcome to this, but having worked in tech, financial services and retail a long time (yes I’m old) I have seen all this legislation come in to force over the years. Obviously, I feel, have a good grasp of things in this area, albeit I’m not an expert.
I have now written to them one final time to request they take my name and company name from their website and so I will wait for the next steps!
Anyone else had this happen? What did you do?