Privacy Notice

Our third party partners

We work with a number of third party partners to provide you with price comparison services. When you access our services through our third party partners, we will collect personal data about you in the following circumstances:

    • When you are transferred to our website from one of our third party partner websites; and

    • Where third parties provide us with your personal data. We rely on our third parties to notify you that they will be sharing your personal data with us.

Please note that we will be the controller of your personal data from the stage we are provided with your personal data (either directly from you or one of our third party partners, whichever is the earlier). You should refer to this privacy notice for details on how we will use and treat your personal data. Please refer to sections 3.1, 3.3 and 3.4 for further information on how we will use your personal data when we are providing you with our services.

Our third party marketing partners

From time to time, we will obtain personal data from our third party marketing partners. This includes your name, email address, telephone number and business address. In these circumstances, we will take reasonable steps to ensure that such third party has collected your personal data fairly and lawfully and, if applicable, has obtained all appropriate consents required from you to allow us to market to you. We ensure that we use experienced business database providers  and we take reasonable steps to ensure they take the protection of your personal data and compliance with data protection legislation seriously.

If we have obtained your personal data from a third party source, we will inform you of where we collected your personal data within a reasonable period of time of having obtained your personal data and provide you with a copy of this privacy notice.

We rely on our legitimate interests as a lawful basis for processing your personal data, to offer and promote our products and services to you.

Subscribing to our marketing

If you are a customer, or have made an enquiry relating to our energy price comparison services, we will have given you a clear opportunity to object or opt-out of receiving marketing communications at the time of collecting your personal data.  If you have not opted out of receiving the marketing communication, we will contact you by email, SMS or telephone in our legitimate interests to promote our products and services that are relevant to your purchase or enquiry. We will also provide you with the option to unsubscribe or object to continuing receiving marketing with each communication. You have the right to object to receiving these communications at any time by contacting us on the details above.

If you are not a customer but are interested in our products and services or you are an existing customer but interested in other products and services we offer (excluding our energy products and services), we will provide you with a clear choice to consent to receiving marketing promotional material, updates, reminders and communications by giving you an opt-in to receiving such communications. If you have provided your consent we will collect your contact details (name, postal address and email address) to provide you with such communications.

You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. For full details on how to withdraw consent please see above.

We use a third party email and SMS marketing platform service provider, to manage our SMS and newsletter subscriptions. They will not use your personal data for any other purpose other than as we instruct them to.

If you ever decide you no longer wish to receive our marketing communications, you can opt out at any time by unsubscribing from the mailing list, using the link provided in the marketing communications email, or by using the contact details above. If you do unsubscribe, please note that we will still keep your email in a separate secure list so that we can make sure that you do not receive our marketing communications again in the future. 

What happens if you do not provide the personal data that we request?

We will need some of your personal data as a contractual necessity in order to provide you with our services or contact you and follow up with you in respect of any query or complaint you have submitted on our website. For example, we need to know your personal contact details in order to identify you and contact you.

Where information is needed for these purposes, if you do not provide it we will not be able to provide you with our services, or contact you and follow up with you in respect of the query or complaint you have submitted on our website. We explain this is the case at the point where we collect this information from you.

Your data and third parties

We use third parties to provide services to us from time to time. We will share data with them where it is in our legitimate interests for our business administrative needs. A list of third parties that we use and how they process personal data is set out in the table below. Please note that these third parties are located within the European Economic Area, unless otherwise stated below.

Disclosure of your information

We will not usually disclose your personal data other than as already explained in sections 3 and 5 above. However, there may be circumstances where we need to share personal data other than as anticipated in sections 3 and 5 above. These include:

    a. where we are legally required to disclose the information. This includes sharing the personal data with tax authorities and law enforcement agencies for the purposes of the prevention and detection of crime;

    b. where we need to disclose the personal data for the purpose of or in connection with any legal proceedings, or for the purpose of obtaining legal advice, or the disclosure is otherwise necessary for the purposes of establishing, exercising or defending legal rights;

    c. disclosure is required to protect our interests, or someone else's interests (for example, to prevent fraud or credit risk reduction);

    d. disclosure is necessary to protect your vital interests (for example if you are unwell at our premises, we may need to seek medical assistance);

    e. it is to a third party for the purposes of providing administrative or processing services on our behalf. If such disclosure is required we will take steps to ensure that the third party protects the personal data in the same way that we do and notify you of any changes to this privacy notice; and

    f. to any prospective purchaser of our business assets or organisation.

Keeping your personal information secure

We know that you provide your personal data in good faith and expect it to be looked after. This is why we take the security of your personal data seriously. This means that we have taken steps internally in order to ensure that our systems adequately protect your personal data. This includes:

    a. locating all personal data that we control on servers located in the United Kingdom and EEA;

    b. ensuring strict access controls to your personal data on a need to know basis and monitoring such access to customer personal data;

    c. encryption of the personal data on our website and all electronic transactions using SSL technology; and

    d. where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are     responsible for keeping this password confidential, together with any login details and/or user details. We ask you not to share your     password, login or user details with anyone.

    Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your     personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our website and prior to us receiving it. Any     transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try     to prevent unauthorised access including those measures set out above.

Automated Decisions

We use automated decision making when you complete a form on our website and submit it to access our price comparison services. This means we make decisions using the personal data you provide using only technology and none of our employees or any other individuals have been involved.  You will receive quotes from suppliers, and these quotes will vary in price depending on the information you provide us, including how much your utility bill is usually (whether paid on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis) and where you are located in the UK.  For example, if you usually pay a significant utility bill each month, this indicates that you have a high utility usage and therefore the quotes returned from our suppliers are likely to be higher as compared to someone who has a low utility usage and month bill.  You have a right to object to automated decision-making – please see section 9.3(e) below.

Your rights

You have rights in respect of your personal data and this section explains a bit more about those rights that are applicable to how we use your personal data, and the circumstances in which you are able to exercise these rights. If you would like more information about any of your rights, please contact us on the details set out above.

Accessing your personal data

We want you to fully understand and be comfortable with how we use your personal data. You can contact us at any time to ask whether we process any personal data about you. If we do hold or use your personal data in any way, you have the right to access that personal data. All we ask is that:

    a. you make your request to access in writing to the contact details above;

    b. you verify your identity; and

    c. you are fair and reasonable with how often you make this kind of request (please note if you are unreasonable in the number and     frequency of requests you make, we may charge an administrative fee for processing any further requests. We will notify you of this     prior to incurring such an administrative fee).

    Please allow us up to one month from receipt of your request (or verification of your identity, whichever is the later) in order to     provide you with our response.

Requesting more information

We hope that you can understand that it is very difficult to cover all the possible ways in which we collect and use personal data. We have tried to be as clear and as open as we can and will continue to update this privacy notice as our use of personal data develops. However, if you have any questions regarding ou Information Collection And Use

r use of your personal information, we will be happy to give you peace of mind by answering any questions or providing any additional information that we can. If you do have any specific questions, or need anything explaining, please get in touch on the contact details above.

Additional rights

You also have some additional rights that you may exercise as set out here. We may publish a policy, from time to time, to explain how we will handle such requests and what you can expect from us when you make a request to exercise your rights. If we do publish any such policy, we will provide a link to it here. In each instance we may ask you to make your request in writing to the contact addresses above and provide verification of your identity.

    a. You have the right to request that we rectify any inaccuracy about you that we may hold, in which case we may ask you to verify the corrected information (for example, we may ask for a recent utility bill for proof of change of address).

    b. You have the right to request that we erase your personal data. Please be aware that we can only comply with such a request if

        ◦ your personal data is no longer required for the purposes it was collected for (for example, we need your personal information to respond to a communication or query);

        ◦ the collection, storage or use of the personal information by us is prevented by law;

        ◦ your personal data is not required for the purposes of establishing, exercising or defending a legal claim such as in the conduct of         legal proceedings.

    b. You have the right to request that we restrict or refrain from processing your personal data:

        ◦ for the time it takes us to verify the accuracy of your personal data where you have disputed its accuracy;

        ◦ where the collection, storage or use of the personal data by us is unlawful but you decide not to ask for erasure;

        ◦ where, we no longer need your personal data but you need them for the purposes of establishing, exercising or defending a legal           claim;

        ◦ for the time it takes to determine whether we have an overriding legitimate ground to continue to process your personal data,              where you have exercised your right to object to processing.

    c. You have the right to data portability in respect of information we have collected from you based on consent or for the reason of     entering into a contract (contractual necessity). If you exercise this right, we will transfer a copy of the information that you have     provided to us ­­­at your request.

    d. You have the right to object to our use of your personal data:

        ◦ where we are using that information based on our legitimate interests, and where we do not have compelling overriding grounds          to continue to use your personal data;

        ◦ at any time, where we use your personal data to send you the newsletter or any other type of direct marketing, in which case it will       no longer be used for that purpose, but we may use it for another lawful purpose; or

        ◦ where we have made a decision about you using automated decision making. Don't worry if you do not want us to use our          automated system to process your personal data you can object to us using automated processing as we have another process in          place where you can access our price comparison services by speaking to one of our advisors and contacting us at our call centre on     the following number: 01282 610 390 Option 1.

    e. You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time where we have collected your personal data based on your consent. Please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing based on your consent prior to you making such withdrawal.