Unsolicited campaign e-mails

How can it be right for Beatrice Wishart to be sending folk campaign emails using addresses the Lib Dems collected in the course of their work as our constituency MSP/MP?

I know that their email addresses must have been harvested at least four years ago (when Beatrice was not yet an MSP), because that’s when I changed my name and she’s using one of my old email addresses.

I believe, under GDPR, that you are not allowed to collect personal information for one purpose and then use it for another.

Do election regulations allow Ms Wishart to use her constituency email database during the election period, when she is technically no longer an MSP?

If so, then surely that gives the Liberal Democrats a very unfair advantage in Orkney and Shetland, during a pandemic which prohibits door to door canvassing, and where none of the other party candidates have access to decades of email addresses gathered from constituents.

Kerrie Meyer
Bigton

A spokesperson for Beatrice Wishart responded saying: “The Liberal Democrats comply with all relevant UK and European data protection legislation. Information is therefore never shared between parliamentary casework and political campaigning.
“We take the GDPR principle of transparency very seriously and state the ways we may use personal data clearly within the privacy policy on our website.”