The seller’s problem: no ground, no compatibility, no notice
Run the three checks and watch each fail. Ground: selling the list serves your interest in the sale price — but section 11(1)(f) requires balancing, and disclosing customers to a stranger for purposes they never imagined seldom survives it; no other ground comes close. Compatibility: you collected the information to serve customers, not to merchandise them — section 15’s test fails and nothing in s 15(3) deems it compatible. Openness: section 18(1)(h)(i) expected your notice to name recipients or categories of recipients — “whoever pays us” was not on it.
The buyer’s problem: section 69 cannot be bought
The list’s only commercial use is marketing — and for electronic marketing the buyer needs the data subject’s consent or an existing customer relationship. A bought list supplies neither: the people on it are not the buyer’s customers, and consent given (if ever) to the seller is not consent to the buyer’s marketing. The buyer gets exactly one lawful move — the once-off section 69(2) consent request — and the amended Regulations close the workaround the industry leaned on:
“For the purposes of direct marketing through unsolicited electronic communications, opt-out shall not constitute consent as referred to in section 69 (2) of the Act.”
Blasting the list and honouring unsubscribes is therefore not compliance — it is the conduct that earned FT Rams Consulting the first direct-marketing enforcement notice and a R100 000 fine (see the enforcement tracker).
What remains lawful
The going-concern sale: customer records transferring with the business they belong to, the buyer continuing the same service — purpose continuity, disclosed in a decent notice, is the distinction. Referral partnerships where the customer is asked and agrees. Joint promotions where each party markets its own base. And ordinary marketing to your own customers, which POPIA expressly accommodates. What does not survive is the database as a tradeable commodity — that is not a myth about POPIA; it is the point of it.