Privacy and cookie policy
Our customers are at the centre of everything we do at Community Utilities. So as well as providing you with great value and excellent service, we're committed to protecting your privacy.
When we refer to Community Utilities, we, us or our in this privacy policy we mean our group businesses and products and services offered by those businesses.
This privacy policy is for our customers and visitors to our website. It supplements other privacy notices we might provide to you – it doesn’t replace them.
1. Our Contact Details
Our full name and address is set out in our Our Commitments.
To exercise your rights in relation to your personal information, please email hello@communityutilities.co.uk.
You can write to our Data Protection Officer (DPO) on datagovernance@communityutilities.co.uk or at One Central Square, Cardiff, CF10 1FS.
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.
2. Why do we have a privacy policy?
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.
3. Our Role
Community Utilities is part of the same group of companies as Amber Energy Solutions Ltd. Amber is a company registered in England and Wales (registered number 06968134) whose registered office is at 1 Central Square, Cardiff, Wales, CF10 1FS. "We" or “Us” collectively refers to Community Utilities and Amber.
Depending on the provided services we operate in the following capacity:
3.1 Data Controller:
We act as a Data Controller when we are responsible for determining the purposes and means for processing Personal Data. This may involve direct data collection and interactions with data subjects in relation to the services that we provide. This includes managing and safeguarding sensitive information in compliance with GDPR and pertinent privacy legislation.
3.2 Data Processor:
We act in the capacity of a Data Processor when processing Personal Data on behalf of the Customer for specific processing activities. This involves executing tasks as instructed by the Data Controller and maintaining compliance with contractual and legal obligations.
3.3 Sub-Processor Engagement:
We may engage third-party entities as sub-processors to support the delivery of contracted services. This engagement is subject to appropriate agreements and compliance measures to ensure the protection of Personal Data in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.
4. Dealing with your personal information
4.1 Collecting your personal information
What will we collect?
We collect certain personal information from you, which is any information that 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, 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 Community Utilities;
Technical data: internet protocol (IP) address, your login data (including your account 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; and
Energy supply data: this is your supply start date, meter technical details, tariff, and your energy consumption data.
We also use aggregated data 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 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 through various channels. This includes using our website, interacting with us via phone calls, emails, web chat, SMS, and social media messaging platforms such as WhatsApp.
We collect and record data from these interactions to respond to your enquiries, provide support, and enhance the service we deliver.
By monitoring and recording these communications, we ensure that we can offer the best possible service and maintain accurate records of your interactions with us.
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.
Additional Usage Information:
We process your personal information to deliver, maintain, and enhance our services, which includes the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that are necessary for optimising service delivery, improving customer experience, and enhancing support capabilities, including but not limited to:
Analysis of Interactions: Enhancing our understanding of user interactions to provide better support and service.
Transcription of Communications: Converting communications, including web chat, into text for record-keeping and improved responses.
Chatbot and Voice Bot Interactions: Employing AI-driven chat and voice bots for handling both voice and text-based customer interactions to provide prompt assistance.
Personalisation: Tailoring our services and communications to better meet your needs and preferences.
Please be assured that our use of these technologies is fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We adhere to rigorous technical security measures and uphold strict security and privacy standards to ensure the protection of your data.
Contacting you
We’ll contact you by the method we’ve agreed with you in our Our Commitments.
Marketing information
When you first provide your personal information to us, we’ll give you the chance to choose whether you’d be happy for us 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 us and our related businesses in the wider Amber Enterprises group (or they may contact you directly) while you are a customer of us.
The Amber Enterprises group includes our related companies such as Amber Energy Solutions Limited, Twenty50 Limited, and other subsidiaries of Amber Enterprises 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 your Community Utilities portal or contact us at hello@communityutilities.co.uk 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, advanced machine learning, 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;
credit-reference and debt collection agencies. For more information on how we conduct credit checks, please see our Our Commitments;
professional advisers such as lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services; and
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.
4.4 Protecting your personal information
We follow strict security procedures to protect your personal information, including verifying your identity during communications to ensure secure interactions. We uphold the highest standards of security and technical organisational measures in accordance with GDPR to safeguard your data. This includes implementing robust protocols and ensuring that any use of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) technologies adheres to these stringent security and privacy standards.
We strongly recommend that you do not disclose any Community Utilities login details to anyone and always remember to log out of your account when you have finished using our website.
From time to time, our website may provide hypertext links to sites created by individuals and companies outside of Community Utilities. While we strive to ensure the relevance of these links, we cannot take responsibility for the practices or content of external sites.
When you communicate with us via social media platforms or messaging services, such as WhatsApp, please be aware that these platforms operate under their own privacy policies and security measures. By choosing to interact with us through these platforms, you consent to the processing of your personal data by the respective platform in accordance with its privacy policy, and you do so at your own discretion. We will handle any personal data shared through these channels in line with our data retention policies. Please note that while we take measures to protect your personal information, we do not have control over how these platforms manage and process data shared through their services.
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 must 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.
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.
Please be aware that if you send us personal data via social media messaging platforms, this data will be stored along with your other account records in line with our standard data retention period. We may use the information provided through these channels to update your account details.
Details of retention periods for different aspects of your personal information are available in our retention policy which you can request by contacting us.
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 hello@communityutilities.co.uk .
You can 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.
4.7. Overseas data transfers
From time to time, it may be necessary to transfer your information to third-party entities located outside of the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Economic Area (EEA) (“International Transfers”) for the provision of contracted products and services. In accordance with GDPR and applicable data protection laws, such International Transfers are permitted providing additional safeguards are in place to maintain the privacy and security of your personal information. Community Utilities remains committed to the protection of your data and will rely on Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) supported by Transfer Risk Assessments (TRA) when making International Transfers to ensure the secure and lawful processing of personal information in line with applicable data protection laws.
Definitions
Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs): SCCs are contractual clauses adopted data protection authorities, which set out the appropriate safeguards for the transfer of personal data to third countries that do not ensure an adequate level of data protection.
Transfer Risk Assessments (TRAs): Transfer Risk Assessments are conducted to assess and mitigate the risks associated with the international transfer of personal data. TRAs help ensure that adequate safeguards are in place to protect the privacy and security of personal information during such transfers.
Consent for International Transfers: It is important to note that, in certain circumstances, no additional consent is required for International Transfers when relying on SCCs and TRAs. However, such transfers will only be made when there is a legitimate reason, such as when it is necessary for the provision of contracted products and services.
5. Community Utilities’ use of cookies
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 Community Utilities use cookies?
We use cookies to understand how people use our websites and to help us to make your experience of our websites better.
Community Utilities 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 Hotjar 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 Hotjar, which is similar to Google Analytics. Where Google Analytics identifies overall trends in people’s browsing habits, Hotjar 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 also use products like Google Ads Advertising, including Google Analytics, 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.
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:
Google Analytics Advertising Features – visit www.google.com/setting/ads and adjust your personal settings as per their instructions;
Google Doubleclick (for Google Ads 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 Community Utilities; and
Hotjar - follow this link to opt out of Hotjar https://www.hotjar.com/legal/compliance/opt-out . You can read Hotjar’s privacy policy here: https://www.hotjar.com/legal/policies/privacy
However, it’s important to remember that
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 datagovernance@communityutilities.co.uk and we’ll do our best to help you.
6. Changes to our Privacy Policy
If we make any changes to our privacy policy, we’ll post changes on this page.
We keep this Policy under regular review and may change it from time to time. If we change this Policy we will post the changes on this page, and place notices on other pages of the Website as applicable, so that you may be aware of the information we collect and how we use it at all times. You are responsible for ensuring that you are aware of the most recent version this Policy as it will apply each time you access the Website.
This Policy was last updated on 23/08/2024.