Spam texts promoting loans and nuisance calls about accident insurance claims are just some of the inevitable fruits of harvested personal data. In March this year, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued one of its highest fines to a Hampshire company that had made over 22m nuisance calls. The company in question was fined(pdf) £270,000. In its defence, it claimed it purchased data from a number of different third party providers and that the data had been screened against the Telephone Preference Service and it was all “opt-in”.