GDPR Week #12 - Look what you've done!

Remember a few weeks back (on Week #9 of this series: www.dma.org.uk/article/the-gdpr-week-9-whats-integral-to-marketing-and-is-like-mushrooms/) we suggested you trawl through the exciting world of online competition sites, using your specially minted email address? The idea was that you could see what happened next.
So, we'd love to know how it's going. We tried a similar exercise a couple of years ago and had generated 300 or 400 marketing emails within a month. Even if you haven't had quite so many specially targeted marketing contacts over the past 3 weeks it's very likely you've had enough to understand how much of the lead generation industry still works.
There are plenty of legitimate and ethical generators and providers of marketing data out there. But lots that are neither legitimate or ethical. In a world where the ultimate source and original contact permissions for lead data is hard to define, you need to be very confident of where your marketing data originally came from. In theory this has always been the case, but under the GDPR and the new Data Protection Act there's no legal room to avoid your obligations to only rent or buy lead data you are entirely confident of.
(And by the way, for the purposes of this conversation, Legitimate Interest will be of little help to you)

PS Whether or not you buy or rent data, you really need to read the latest marketing guidance from the DMA and DPN on 'The Essentials' and Accountability: www.dma.org.uk/article/dma-gdpr-guidance-for-marketers