Privacy Policy
Data Policy
Last updated: [May 18th 2009]
Data Controller
Any personal information that you provide on the Energy Saving Trust website atwww.energysavingtrust.org.uk is controlled by the Energy Saving Trust Limited.
Your personal information
Occasionally you will be asked to submit personal information about yourself (e.g. name, address and email address) in order to receive or use services on our websites. Such services include details of grants and offers, newsletters, publications, information and advice.
By entering your details in the fields requested and submitting your information on the website, you are consenting to the processing of your information by the Energy Saving Trust and its agents in accordance with this Data Policy. You may also provide personal information to us when you contact us by email, telephone or letter. Whenever you provide such personal information, we will treat that information in accordance with this policy. Our services are designed to give you the information that you have requested. The Energy Saving Trust will, at all times, act in accordance with current legislation and aim to meet current Internet best practice.
Use and storage of your personal information
When you supply any personal information to the Energy Saving Trust we have legal obligations towards you in the way we deal with that information. We must collect the information fairly, that is, we must explain how we will use it. This Data Policy explains how we will use your personal information. The 'Data Protection Notice' that you will find present whenever personal information is collected will provide additional information about how your personal information will be used by the Energy Saving Trust.
We will use personal information provided by you or gathered by the Energy Saving Trust for the following purposes:
- To process and respond to requests, enquiries and complaints received from you
- To provide services requested by you
- To communicate with you about services provided to you
- To keep our records up-to-date
- To analyse customer trends
- For audit purposes
- To carry out customer satisfaction research
- To recommend products and services that we believe will be of interest to you
- To enable third parties to carry out any of the purposes above on our behalf
- In relation to grants or funding we may require your personal information in order to:
- To process payments
- To assess your eligibility for help schemes
- To ensure compliance with grant terms & conditions (this may potentially include site inspections)
To monitor the energy efficiency of the UK housing stock, and to assist in targeting activity.
- Calls to and from the Energy Saving Trust/Energy Saving Scotland Advice Centres may be recorded to monitor and improve our customer service.
If you are notified that your personal information may be used to allow the Energy Saving Trust to contact you for 'service administration purposes', this means that the Energy Saving Trust may contact you for a number of purposes related to the service you have signed up for. For example, we may wish to provide you with password reminders or notify you that the particular service has been suspended or changed.
We will not contact you for promotional purposes, such as notifying you of new offers and grants relating to sustainable energy use, unless you specifically agree to be contacted for such purposes at the time you submit your information on the website, or at a later time if you sign up specifically to receive such promotional information.
Where you have opted-in to future communications, we will, on each subsequent communication, offer you an easily executable 'opt-out' option, which will allow you to remove yourself from any future mailings.
Sharing of your personal information
The Energy Saving Trust may share your personal information with third parties in the following ways:
- We sometimes use agents and service providers to process personal information on our behalf. For example, we use third parties to carry out site inspections to assess grant legibility, to send postal mail, to carry out credit checks and to maintain our IT systems. Where we use agents and service providers to process your personal information, we will ensure that they have adequate security measures in place and comply with our privacy policies in respect of the use of your personal information
- We share information with government departments and government bodies that provide funding to the Energy Saving Trust or have an interest in the Energy Saving Trust's activities. Information is passed to government departments and government bodies for analysis purposes
- We will release your personal information when we are required to do so for legal or regulatory purposes or as part of legal proceedings
- We will release your personal information to others when you have given your consent to that release
- The Energy Saving Trust may occasionally present a promotion that is sponsored by a third-party company. To qualify for entry, we may ask you to provide personal information. If we plan to share that information with the sponsor(s) we will make this clear at the point of collection of your information
Use of Cookies
During the course of any visit to the Energy Saving Trust website, the pages you see, along with something called a cookie, are downloaded to your computer. Most, if not all, websites do this, because cookies allow the website publisher to accumulate useful data such as whether the computer (and sometimes its user) has visited the website before. This is done on a repeat visit by checking to see, and finding, the cookie left there on the last visit.
We use cookies to help us to provide you with a better service and to assist us to analyse the profile of our visitors. From time to time we will review the information cookies provide on how the website is used in order to improve navigation and increase the relevance of content.
What is a cookie?
When you enter a website your computer will automatically be issued with a cookie. Cookies are text files that identify your computer to our server. Cookies in themselves do not identify the individual user, just the computer used. Many websites do this whenever a user visits their website in order to track traffic flows.
Cookies themselves only record those areas of the website that have been visited by the computer in question, and for how long. Users have the opportunity to set their computers to accept all cookies, to notify them when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies at any time. The last of these, of course, means that certain personalised services cannot then be provided to that user.
Access to your personal information
You have the right to request a copy of the personal information the Energy Saving Trust holds about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected. We will ask for confirmation of identity before we disclose any personal information and may charge a £10 administration fee to process the request. Please address requests to the Data Protection Officer, Energy Saving Trust, 21 Dartmouth St, London, SW1H 9BP.
Right to stop marketing communications
You have the right to ask us not to process your personal information for marketing purposes. We will always inform you before collecting your information if we intend to use your information for such purposes. You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by ticking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your information. You can also exercise the right at any time by contacting us.
Changes to the Data Policy
We may update this Data Policy from time to time. Any changes we may make to the Data Policy in the future will be posted on this page.
