Privacy Policy

We’re committed to providing you with an excellent customer experience: before, during and after you sign-up to Ecotricity, and throughout your time with us. To help us do this, we need to collect information from you when you visit our websites and contact us. We then use it to:

• provide you with any goods or services requested
• administer your account, including telling you of changes
• do risk assessment, credit-referencing and fraud prevention
• better manage our call centre
• identify whether you may have experienced problems requesting one of our products or services
• generally provide the best service to you that we can!

We also use it to:

• tell you about special offers from our partners
• do marketing and market research,
• tell you about cool new stuff on our website.

If you'd rather not receive this information, please let us know by contacting our Customer Experience Team on 08000 326 100 or info@ecotricity.co.uk

We may also contact credit reference agencies who will record the search. If we intend to use information for any other purposes we'll tell you when we collect it and you'll have at least 28 days to object. This privacy policy only covers Ecotricity websites. Links within these sites to other websites are not covered by this policy.

Data security protection

Ecotricity complies with the Data Protection Act 1998. We collect, store and use personal data carefully, and ensure that it is kept secure. We do not, and will not, pass the information that you give us to any organisations except our agents and relevant industry service providers.

How & what we collect

We collect the information requested by any of our web forms, together with any comments or ideas that you may send us. We also collect information about how people use our website. This is so we can continually improve the online customer experience.

We may monitor and record communications with you (including phone conversations and e-mails) for quality assurance and to make sure that we are meeting our legal and regulatory requirements.

How to find out what data we have about you

You can e-mail us at info@ecotricity.co.uk or write to:

The Data Protection Controller, Axiom House, Station Road, Stroud, GL5 3AP.

You can also get details of the credit agencies from which we get, and which we record, information about you.

The information that you request will be provided within a maximum of 40 working days. We try to ensure that the information we hold is accurate, up to date and relevant and we'll be happy to correct any inaccuracies. There may be a fee of up to £10 for this.

Priority service customers

Where we believe that you, or a member of your household, need extra care due to factors such as age, health, disability or financial insecurity, we may record this fact on our records. We will use this information specifically for protecting these customers and their household from loss of service.

If you give us information on behalf of someone else, you confirm that you have given them the information set out in this document and that they have not objected to their personal information being used in the way described in it.  

Website security

We use secure pages (such as SSL) to encrypt sensitive customer information that you enter in our web forms before it is then sent to us. We store and manage this information securely to prevent unauthorised access.

Identifying you as a customer

To ensure we keep your personal details secure, and restrict unauthorised access to your account, we will always ask you a set of security questions before discussing your account with you. Only named account holders can discuss or request changes to be made on your Ecotricity account. Please co-operate with us when establishing your identity, to help combat identity fraud.

What are cookies?

Cookies are files that are recorded in temporary Internet folders on your PC. They’re a useful tool because they enable us to better understand how people use our website. This in turns means we can continually improve your online experience at the Ecotricity websites.

We understand that some people have concerns about cookies. Briefly, cookies record no personal data, can't read your hard disk, can't be used to create viruses or destructive programs on your computer, and can't be used to instantly fill up your hard drive. You can read more about cookies, their uses and risks at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

What about e-mail?

As an environmentally-focused company we’re committed to taking steps to reduce our reliance on paper in our customer communications. Therefore we will strive to use email communications wherever possible.

In the case of marketing communications we will always allow you to unsubscribe from this form of communication.

'Phishing' is a term which refers to the illegal collection of personal information over the internet by criminal organisations or individuals pretending to be official companies. Frequently, this is by email. Rest assured we will never ask you to email us any personal information, such as payment/financial details or your address! If you are ever concerned or unsure, please contact us first.

Privacy policy updates

We will update our policies on this page with the date of change.

External links

From time to time we include hypertext links to sites which are created by individuals and companies outside Ecotricity. We do this when there is a particular relevance to the topic you're reading about. And whilst we endeavour to check that the content of these sites is suitable, we unfortunately cannot take any responsibility for the practices of the companies who publish the sites that we link to, nor the integrity of the content contained within them.

© Ecotricity - October 29, 2007