Channel 5, the YouTube channel hosted by Andrew Callaghan, said it gave a list of its email subscribers to Hunter Biden, the former president’s son, who went on to promote his new memecoin, a move that a data privacy expert told 404 Media is likely illegal in some jurisdictions.
Callaghan has repeatedly interviewed Biden on camera. Apparently over the cross of that source and interviewer relationship, Biden “asked if he could use our mailing list whenever he launched a new product,” according to
a statement
posted by Channel 5 to X on Monday. The statement said that Channel 5 did actually provide Biden with real user data: “We provided him a simple csv sheet from our email list to help him expand his audience.”
And although Channel 5 said in a follow-up statement that “emails from Hunter’s team have not gone out to any of our public subscribers,” sharing the data at all has understandably sparked a huge backlash.
It’s also probably illegal.
“Assuming that the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] does apply, and on the basis of this privacy notice and the language used to sign up to a newsletter, I am struggling to see how providing a list of email addresses of newsletter subscribers to a third party for direct marketing purposes is consistent with the GDPR,” Neil Brown, a data protection lawyer
with Decoded Legal
, told 404 Media in an email. The GDPR is the European Union’s broad data protection legislation.
It’s not entirely clear which email list Channel 5 is referring to in its statements, but people can sign up for the company’s newsletter at the bottom of both its members’ website and its merch store. The
privacy policy
of that first site says that under California’s “Shine the Light” law, “California residents may request certain information regarding our disclosure of your information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes.” The privacy policy then says, “We do not disclose your information to third parties for their direct mark
