Dear colleague,

As a dental surgeon running my own small business, I recognise that time is a very precious resource.  As we transition to the ‘information age’, our data is becoming a resource in itself, with companies targeting us with personalised mailshots and unsolicited emails and telephone calls in an attempt to sell us goods and services.  Even more worrying is the trend for malicious actors to use our information to attempt to gain access to our login details fraudulently, in phishing attacks for instance. As much as we try to minimise the ‘leaking’ of our personal or practice details online, we all have a digital footprint and have limited control over some aspects of it, such as the listing of our email and surgery addresses on the NHS and CQC websites.

I am, quite frankly, tired of this state of affairs.  I wake up to dozens of spam emails every morning, along with one or two malicious ‘phishing’ attempts.  You will know as well as I do, that pressing the ‘unsubscribe’ button is a mug’s game.  Even for someone as tech-savvy as myself (blowing my own trumpet!), my efforts to prevent my contact details from falling into the wrong hands feel like a daily uphill struggle.  I find that since the pandemic, the incidence of unsolicited emails has shot up at an unprecedented rate.

This is when i decided to take a stand.  I hit back at my spammers with Subject Access Requests.  An interesting pattern emerged: several companies admitted using a mailing list that they claimed to have obtained legitimately and in good faith from a company named Searchline Publishing.  I dug deeper into this mysterious company, and it turns out that Searchline is a purveyor of a list of over 12,000 contact details for dental surgeries over the UK.  Allegedly, the company is GDPR compliant, and all the surgeries/principals on the list have agreed to being on the mailing list.  This list is sold on a CD for over £400 to anyone who cares to obtain our contact details, be it a legitimate dental supplier running a mailshot or a scammer wanting to personalise a scam email to make it more believable.  In 2021, I raised a complaint with the ICO, and this was adjudicated in my favour. I asked for my details to be removed and not to be added to the dreaded list again.

Fast forward to 2024, and another Subject Access Request named Searchline as the source of my contact details.  A request to Searchline themselves assured me that the details they held for me ‘had not changed since 2021’ and no email addresses of mine were included in their list.  This is clearly untrue, as I discovered Searchline held an address for me that we only moved our surgery to in 2023, a full 2 years after my request to be removed from their mailing list. To add insult to injury, there is no way Searchline can remove any contact details from CDs that they have already sold, making their business model unsound and potentially in breach of GDPR legislation.

I have taken the liberty of creating a link which generates a Subject Access Request to Searchline Publishing, along with a request to remove your contact information from their database. Please modify the email to include your name, date and contact details to personalise it before sending it. Please note that the person behind Searchline can be rather obstructive; after all, he makes money by selling our information, so it is painful for him to comply with GDPR and lose another address off the list. Do not let this put you off; it is your legal right to have a say in how your information is used and a right and an obligation to lower the risk of exposure to online scams and unsolicited marketing emails. The link will fire up your email program automatically. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the text of the email below

Best regards,

Conrad Costa

Subject Access Request as per GDPR 2018

—Insert Date—

To whom it may concern My name is —insert—

I would like to know whether my details are held on any databases administered by Searchline Publishing. My trading address is —insert—.

My email address(es) include —insert—. I am not a customer of yours and have no reference numbers of note.

I note from your website that you state that my details were meant to have had an ‘opt-in’ to marketing emails; I would appreciate a copy of this opt-in as I have no recollection of this.

You may reply to my request via email. Going forward, I request that any details you hold for me are removed from your database(s) and that you desist from adding me on at any point in the future.

Yours sincerely, —insert name—

Email to: info@searchlinepublishing.co.uk