A PRINTING firm that handles tens of thousands of customer details is not registered with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.
RR Donnelley Document Solutions prints transactional bills, which include account details, pin numbers, itemised phone records and other personal information, for Vodafone, Eircom, and O2.
The company, based in Ballymount and Stillorgan in south Dublin, deals in both billing and direct mailing and has processed data on behalf of their Irish customers for at least the last three years.
The Office of Data Protection Commissioner recently notified the company about their failure to register and received a letter in response stating the company’s intention to comply with data regulations.
Diarmuid Hallinan, head of registration at the data commissioner’s office, confirmed RR Donnelley Document Solutions were not registered with the office but said both sides had been in correspondence regarding the issue.
“We have received an application for registration by RR Donnelley Document Solutions and have put a written response back to the company with certain queries,” he said.
Mr Hallinan said any company in possession of personal data is required to register with the data commissioner’s office and any company not registered is breaking the law under section 19 of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003.
However, Mr Hallinan noted that section 17 of the Data Protection Acts outlines that if a company in possession of data has made an application for registration, they should be treated as if the application had been accepted, until a final decision is made by the data commissioner’s office.
RR Donnelley Document Solutions was contacted for comment but did not respond.
A spokeswoman for O2 said the matter is between RR Donnelly Document Solutions and the data commissioner’s office.
Vodafone’s spokeswoman said they had met all data protection legislation requirements by signing a data processing agreement and a vendor contract agreement with RR Donnelley Document Solutions.
A spokeswoman for Eircom said: “RR Donnelley Document Solutions is under contractual obligation from Eircom to comply with the Data Protection Act.”
RR Donnelley Document Solutions also has a contract with the cable television and broadband provider UPC. A spokeswoman for UPC confirmed that RR Donnelley Document Solutions is contracted to provide the company’s marketing materials but said their customers’ data is not at risk.
RR Donnelley Document Solutions is a subsidiary of Chicago-based company RR Donnelley, regarded as the world’s largest printing company, employing about 55,000 and servicing some 60,000 customers worldwide.
The 140-year-old American print and manufacturing company bought the Dublin printing company Astron Media Services in 2005 as part of the sale of the Irish firm’s international parent company, Astron.