Last updated: 25 September 2018
Our customers are at the centre of everything we do at OVO. So as well as providing you with great value and excellent service, we're committed to protecting your privacy.
When we refer to OVO, we, us or our in this privacy policy we mean our group businesses and products and services offered by those businesses, including supplying gas or electricity under our OVO Energy and Boost brands. The specific OVO business processing your personal data is the business set out in your terms and conditions.
This privacy policy is for customers of OVO and supplements other privacy notices we might provide to you – it doesn’t replace them.
What’s in this policy
2. Why do we have a privacy policy?
3. Changes to our privacy policy
4. Dealing with your personal information
4.1 Collecting your personal information
4.2 Using your personal information
4.3 Disclosing your personal information
4.4 Protecting your personal information
4.5 How long we’ll use your personal information
5.3 How can you manage cookies and where can you find further information?
6. Personal data processing activities we carry out
Our full name and address is set out in your terms and conditions.
To exercise your rights in relation to your personal information, please email [email protected] or [email protected].
You can write to our Data Protection Officer (DPO) at Data Protection and Legal team, OVO Energy, 1 Rivergate, Temple Quay, Bristol BS1 6ED.
If you have any data protection complaints, you’re able to contact the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) (www.ico.org.uk). We’d like to try and help with any concerns you may have before you contact the ICO, so please get in touch with us in the first instance.
We’ll collect certain personal information from you when you use our website, when you get in touch with us about any of our products or services, and during any process to sign up, change or cancel your products and services.
The purpose of our privacy policy is to let you know:
how and why we collect your personal information;
how we use and disclose your personal information (and to whom);
how we protect your personal information; and
your legal rights and how the law protects you.
If we make any changes to our privacy policy, we’ll post changes on this page. If they’re major changes, then we’ll also send you an email letting you know.
4.1 Collecting your personal information
What will we collect?
We collect certain personal information from you, which is any information which might identify you. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).
The information we collect includes:
Contact data (your name, email address, postal address, phone number, date of birth and any other relevant information we need in order to contact or identify you);
Financial data (your bank account and payment details relating to products and services you receive from OVO);
Technical data (internet protocol (IP) address, your login data (including your My OVO or My Boost username and password), browser type and version, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access this website. We track technical data by using cookies - see section 4 below for more details on cookies);
Usage data (information about how you use our website, products and services);
Marketing and communications data (your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences);
Energy supply data (this is your supply start date, meter technical details, tariff and if you have a smart meter installed at your property we’ll also capture your energy consumption data – please see our FAQ on how we collect smart data here); and
Special categories of data (health and financial vulnerability data, if applicable, to include you on the Priority Services Register).
We also use aggregated data, in order to improve our operations and ensure we are providing you with the best service possible. All aggregated data is anonymised and doesn’t reveal your identity.
It’s really important that the personal data we hold about you is up to date so please let us know if your personal data changes at any time.
When will we collect it?
We (and our agents) collect certain personal information from and about you during your sign-up journey and when you get in contact with us or use our website or as part of providing our services to you.
We may also monitor and record any communications we have with you, including phone calls and emails, to make sure we are providing an excellent service to our customers.
4.2 Using your personal information
We’ll only use your personal information where we’re allowed to by law. Generally, this will be under one or more of the following circumstances:
to perform our contract we have or will have with you;
it’s necessary for us to run our business and give you the best possible service;
where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation; and/or
for marketing purposes where you have agreed to us using your personal data, see the “Marketing Information” section below for more information.
For more detail on how we use your personal information see the table at section 6 of this privacy policy.
Contacting you
We’ll contact you by the method we’ve agreed with you in our terms and conditions.
Marketing information
When you first provide your personal information to OVO, we’ll give you the chance to choose whether you’d be happy for the OVO group to contact you with marketing information. If you choose to be contacted, we may use your identity, contact, usage and profiled data to tell you about exciting new products and services from OVO and our related businesses in the wider OVO group (or they may contact you directly) including for up to 12 months after you've left OVO.
The OVO group includes OVO’s related companies such as VCharge UK Ltd, Corgi HomePlan Ltd, Corgi HomeHeat Ltd and other subsidiaries of OVO Group Limited from time to time.
If you decide you want to opt-out of receiving marketing communications after you have opted-in, or want to change how you receive them, you can always change your preferences in My OVO or My Boost or contact us at [email protected] or [email protected] at any time. This won’t affect any marketing information we sent to you before you let us know.
We’ll occasionally remind you that you can update your preferences for receiving marketing information, or if you haven’t told us what your preferences are, we might get in touch to find out.
4.3 Disclosing your personal information
We may share your personal information with the following types of organisation to use personal information for the purposes set out in section 6 below, including:
service providers who provide engineering services, industry data collection and aggregation, call-centre, IT and system administration services;
marketing agencies to provide you with information about our products and services or other products and services which may be of interest to you (provided you’ve given your consent) and to help manage any reward or loyalty schemes;
price comparison sites which might take your details where you decide to request a quote or switch to us through that site; and
credit-reference and debt collection agencies. For more information on how we conduct credit checks, please see section 9 of our Core Terms and Conditions here and our guide to credit checks here; and for more information about credit reference agencies and how they use personal information please see the Credit Reference Agency Information Notice here
professional advisers such as lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services;
regulators and other authorities based in the UK who we need to report to about what we’re doing with your personal data in certain circumstances (including third parties instructed by those authorities to process personal data on their behalf).
Where third parties are processing data on our behalf, they won’t use your personal information for their own purposes and we only permit them to use it in accordance with our instructions and the law.
Disclosing information outside the EU
Sometimes the organisations listed above may be outside the European Economic Area (EEA), so we may pass your personal information to countries that do not have the same standards or protection for personal information as the UK. If we, our agents or our service providers do this, we’ll always make sure that these organisations adequately secure your personal information.
Switching
We may also ask your previous energy supplier for personal information about you that will allow us to take over your supply (for example, information about your meter readings, meter technical details etc.). Similarly, if you switch away from OVO, we may provide similar information to your new supplier so they can begin supplying your energy.
Priority Services Register or special needs
If we believe that you (or a member of your household) need extra care (for example, because of your age, health, disability or financial circumstances) and we have your explicit consent to do so, we may record and share this information with the following people to ensure your supply isn’t interrupted:
other energy suppliers if we believe you are considering changing supplier;
an outsourced service company that manages a wide range of energy industry data interactions on our behalf;
the electricity distributor; and
the relevant gas transporter, metering agents or network operator.
4.4 Protecting your personal information
We follow strict security procedures to protect your personal information. This includes following certain guidelines (for example, checking your identity when you phone us).
We strongly recommend that you do not disclose any OVO login details to anyone. Please always remember to logout of your account when you have finished using any of OVO’s websites (such as My OVO and My Boost).
From time to time, our website may provide hypertext links to sites which are created by individuals and companies outside of OVO. We do this if the site is relevant to the topic you’re reading about. Whilst we always try to check that the content of these sites is suitable, we cannot take any responsibility for the practices of the companies who publish the sites that we link to, or the accuracy or relevance of the content on them.
4.5 How long we'll use your personal information
We’ll only retain your personal information for as long as necessary for the reason we collected it, including for any legal requirements we have to comply with.
When deciding on how long to retain your personal information for, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and any applicable legal requirements.
Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available in our retention policy which you can request by contacting us.
In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information (so that it can no longer be associated with you) and use this indefinitely, without further notice.
4.6 Your legal rights
You have various rights in relation to your personal information. These rights are as follows:
request access to your personal information - you can request a copy of the personal information we hold on you;
request correction of your personal information - if any personal information we hold on you is incorrect, you can request to have it corrected;
request erasure of your personal information - you can ask us to delete your personal information in certain circumstances;
object to processing or restrict processing of your personal information - you may object to our processing of your personal data in certain circumstances;
request the transfer of your personal information - to provide you, or a third party you have chosen, with your personal information; and
withdraw consent where we’re relying on consent to process your personal information - if you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We'll advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.
To exercise your rights in relation to your personal information, please email [email protected] or [email protected]
You are able to exercise your rights free of charge, but if you make unfounded, repetitive or excessive requests, we may charge you to carry these out or refuse to act on such requests.
We’ll try to respond to all requests within one month. If your request is complex or if you make lots of requests, we may extend our time to respond – if this is the case, we’ll let you know.
5.1 What are cookies?
A cookie is a piece of information stored in a small file which is sent to and from web pages. They can be used to identify that you’ve visited websites before and some will be stored on your computer by your web browser.
5.2 How does OVO use cookies?
We use cookies to understand how people use our websites and to help us to make your experience of our websites better.
OVO’s websites
We use short-term cookies to recognise your PC as you move around our site and to remember any information you have entered into search boxes for next time you visit us.
Measuring web traffic
We use programs such as Google Analytics and Mixpanel to help us find out:
how many people visit our websites;
which pages are most popular;
how long people spend in each area; and
what information they’re searching for.
These insights help us understand how to improve our websites.
Google Analytics uses cookies to collect non-personally identifiable information like:
browser types;
operating systems;
referring sites that sent you to us; and
the dates and times of a visit.
If you’d like to know more about Google Analytics, click here.
We also use third party analytics services like FullStory, which is similar to Google Analytics. Where Google Analytics identifies overall trends in people’s browsing habits, FullStory helps us to work out ‘why’ those trends exist and answer questions like “why is everybody suddenly visiting a certain page?”.
It allows us to:
see where people click on a webpage;
follow mouse patterns; and
track non-sensitive text that people might type into the site.
Advertising
We use tools such as ValueClick to place OVO ads on other websites you may visit. These tools may set cookies to track the performance of our advertising campaigns and allow us to tailor the advertising you might be interested in.
We also use products like Google Analytics Advertising, including remarketing with Google Analytics, Google Display Network Impression Reporting and Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting features. These products help us understand what ads work best so we can more effectively promote our products and services to you.
We also use Google Adometry to track the way you interact with our ads before you come to our website. This lets us work out which ones are relevant to you and which ones aren’t.
We use Google Adwords Customer Match to help exclude our existing customers from seeing our ads, and to reach similar web users who could also be interested in joining OVO.
We use Experian to make the content and advertising shown on devices that you might use more relevant and useful. As part of this process Experian uses cookies and receives information about the kind of device you use as well as your IP address.
5.3 How can you manage cookies and where can you find further information?
If you don’t want us to use cookies in your web browser, you can remove them from your computer or change your browser settings so that it either blocks cookies altogether or asks you if you’d like to accept them from some websites.
You can also stop us collecting data through the following sources:
Mixpanel - download an opt-out browser add-on - the Mixpanel opt-out browser add-on can be found here;
Google Analytics Advertising Features – visit www.google.com/setting/ads and adjust your personal settings as per their instructions;
Adometry – follow this link to opt-out of the Adometry cookie: https://js.dmtry.com/optout/status.html;
Google Doubleclick (for Google Adwords Customer Match) - follow the link to download a plugin so you can opt-out of Google's advertising cookie on Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer - https://www.google.com/settings/ads/plugin. Please note this does not opt you out of being served advertising. You may continue to receive generic ads from OVO; and
FullStory - follow this link to opt out of FullStory https://www.fullstory.com/optout . You can read FullStory’s privacy policy here: https://fullstory.com/legal/privacy.
Experian - OVO Energy uses Experian to make the content and advertising shown on devices that you might use more relevant and useful. As part of this process Experian uses cookies and receives information about the kind of device you use as well as your IP address. If you would like to Opt out of this process you can do so by following this link: www.experianmarketingservices.digital/cookieoptout
However, it’s important to remember that
...some of our cookies are essential for our websites to work properly, particularly our ‘Quote & Switch’ functionality and our account management website (such as My OVO and My Boost).
The internet industry body, the Internet Advertising Bureau, has set up a website to provide information and advice on cookies, tags and behavioural advertising, you can click here to find out more about behavioural advertising. Another trusted source which gives information about how to delete and control cookies is https://www.aboutcookies.org/.
If you have any questions about the way we handle your personal information, or would like to contact our Data Protection Officer, please get in touch at [email protected] or [email protected] and we’ll do our best to help you.
Here is some more information about how we process your data, following section 4.2.
We (and our agents and where applicable third parties in section 4.3) may use your personal information to:
| Activity |
Type of data | Lawful basis |
| Provide our services to you, including:
- registering you as a customer - add you to the Priority Services Register, if relevant - manage payments and charges - collect and recover money owed to us Carry out internal processes related to providing our services to you |
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| Contact you to see if you would like any help if you’ve started but not finished the sign-up journey or have requested a quote from us |
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| Provide you with incentives or run a loyalty scheme |
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| Make suggestions and recommendations to you about goods or services that may be of interest to you |
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| Create internal reports or profiles to analyse information for forecasting and marketing purposes |
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| Contact you for suggestions on how we can improve the way we provide our services to you (e.g., we may ask you to complete a survey) |
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| Help train our staff, including using your calls and emails as part of our quality monitoring and training processes |
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| Using data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships and experiences |
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| To administer and protect our business and to manage and protect this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data) |
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