June 18, 2026
Inbox karma finally arrived
I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M
He said the email trap was illegal — and commenters are cheering the €1.8M karma
TLDR: Elkjøp was fined €1.8 million after a customer spent years arguing it was wrong to force people to stay in a membership club just to stop marketing emails. Commenters treated it like overdue corporate karma, while also asking the brutal question: was the punishment big enough to matter?
A shopper spent five years trying to tell Nordic electronics giant Elkjøp that making people quit its customer club just to stop marketing emails was flat-out illegal — and now the company has been hit with a NOK 20 million fine (about €1.8 million). For readers, this wasn’t just a dry privacy case. It landed like a long-delayed revenge plot: one person said it was "extremely cool reading," another called it an "excellent outcome," and the whole mood was basically finally, somebody got caught.
The biggest reaction? A mix of applause and frustration. People loved seeing a big company punished for trapping customers in a flood of promos, but they were also stunned it took half a decade to get there. One commenter summed up the international envy perfectly: "I wish we had these rights in the USA!" Others immediately went full cynical-accountant mode, asking the question that always shows up when a corporation gets fined: did the company make even more money during those five years than it lost now? That hot take gave the story its sharpest edge.
And because the internet cannot resist side quests, one of the funniest comments wasn’t about privacy at all — it was about the article’s broken AI image, with a reader joking that seeing the raw prompt instead was "genuinely preferable." So yes, this was a legal win, but in the comments it became something even juicier: consumer revenge, American jealousy, corporate side-eye, and accidental comedy all in one thread.
Key Points
- •The article says Elkjøp’s customer club allowed members to stop marketing emails only by cancelling club membership entirely.
- •The author wrote to the company’s Data Protection Officer in July 2021 arguing that bundling marketing consent with membership violated GDPR and ePrivacy rules.
- •A complaint was filed with Sweden’s Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten, which later transferred the case to Norway’s Datatilsynet under GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism.
- •The article identifies Elkjøp Nordic AS as the Norwegian parent company with decision-making power over the processing in question.
- •On 1 June 2026, Datatilsynet fined the Elkjøp group NOK 20 million, described as a little over €1.8 million, after finding the customer-club consent invalid.