Homewise Privacy Policy
Homewise for Energy Saving Trust
As an employee of Energy Saving Trust, you will know we have developed a way of providing instances of our Homewise tool to our commercial customers, which are especially tailored to them.
As a way of providing the same service to our own employees, and testing the tool and its usage, obtaining honest feedback from the biggest supporters of our mission, you, ,we have launched an Energy Saving Trust instance of Homewise.
Your use of the Homewiseinstance for Energy Saving Trust is entirely optional and there is no obligation to use it. If you do choose to, you need to know how we will handle your personal data.
When we collect data from you
When you use Homewisewe collect information about you, some of which is personal data. Personal data is information that is capable of identifying you. We will only use your personal data where there is a lawful reasonfor doing so:
- When it is necessary to fulfil our legitimate interest of maintainingand improving the functionality and security of our tool, anddevelopingand testing it in order toprovide you with the services you have requested
- When it is necessary to fulfil our legitimate interest of carrying out monitoring use, analysis and evaluation of our tool
- When it is necessary to fulfil our legitimate interest of monitoring the geographical usage of our tool
What information we will collect about you
We collect:
- contact information (e.g. name, postal address, email address)
- information about your property (e.g. property age, level of insulation, type of heating)
- information about occupants in your home (e.g. number of occupants, heating pattern, number of baths/showers)
In some cases, some of this information may not be considered personal data, (e.g. information purely about your property, such as property type or energy saving measures).We also use aggregated data as much as possible to get generalised information (e.g. wide geographical areas) that avoidsidentifyingpeople.
Why we ask for this information
We only ask for your information where we have a lawful reasonfor doing so for the following purposes:
- responding to requests, enquiries and complaints received from you
- contacting you about services requested by you
- as long as you are comfortable with it, contacting youto evaluate customer satisfaction and collectingyour feedbackbased on your experience of using Homewise
- keeping our records up to date
We will ask for information about your property and the occupants within it so that we can:
- offer a simplified user journey by pre-populating Homewise with information about your home
- provide you with accurate and tailored energy efficiency advice analyse householder trends and preferences
- improve the quality of our national housing stock database (Home Analytics)
- Monitor the energy efficiency of the UK housing stock, and assist in targeting services and new schemes
Where we collect information about you
We will collect your personal data directly from you when you interact with our tool, if you provide feedback on your use of the tool,and from any other correspondence with us.
To be clear, we will never combine the personal data we collect from you in connection with Homewise with any other personal data we process about you as an employee of Energy Saving Trust.
Sharing information about you
Our instance of Homewise is under ongoing development by our small product team, which has access to the data entered into the tool when they carry out their work to maintain and improve the functionality and the security. If you have said you are happy to be contacted to providefeedback, youmay be contactedby the development team.
We sometimes use other companies and organisations (third parties) to process personal information for us. For example, we use third parties to:
- maintain our IT systems
- carry out research
Some of your property information may be shared by the Energy Saving Trust:
- with your local authority, so that they can target specific areas for energy efficiency measures and schemes
- with devolved and national government so that they can monitor household trends and the success of schemes to encourage the uptake of renewables and mitigate the impacts of fuel poverty
Helping us develop our new Homewise product
We would love to get your honest feedback about our new product so that we can improve it. Your use of the Homewise is voluntary. We will only follow up your use of the tool, asking you for feedback if you are comfortable with us contacting you. If you change your mind at any time, you can let us know and wewill remove your name from thecontacts list.
Google Analytics advertising
Energy Saving Trust has implemented the following Google Analytics advertising features across all instances of Homewise:
- Remarketing –?this enables Energy Saving Trust to display advertising to visitors on our website as they move to other sites
- Display Network Impression Reporting –?Energy Saving Trust can use this to understand the impact of adverts displayed on other sites. We will be able to see when someone views an advert elsewhere and then later visits Energy Saving Trust’s website
- Demographics and Interest Reporting?– this allows us to obtain anonymous information about the users of our website. For example, we will be able to see how many visitors we had to our site in a particular age range. Find out more about?how Google obtains this information
How long we will keep your information
Energy Saving Trust will keep your information for:
Contact information: We keep your contact information in line with legislation and statutory guidelines relevant to your relationship with us inrelation to Homewise, and in any case for no longer than seven years from your last active contact within connection with the tool. All records are destroyed confidentially once their retention period has been met, and we have made the decision that the records are no longer required.
Property information: We will keep information about your property indefinitely so that we can ensure our national housing stock database, Home Analytics,remains as up to date as possible. Extracts of this database are licensed by government bodies and other private organisations for the permitted purposes of improving energy efficiency, increasing adoption of renewable energy and low carbon heating systems, mitigating fuel poverty, and encouraging decarbonation efforts. Your contact details will never be shared alongside your property information.
Your rights
Under data protection law, you have the right, within certain legal parameters,to ask us:
- to tell you about how we use your personal data
- toknow what personal data we hold about you
- to correct your personal data
- to erase your personal data in certain circumstances
- not to use your personal data in a particular way
- to port your personal data in a commonly used electronic format
- to restrict how we use your personal data
- not to be subject to automated decision making and profiling and to request human intervention
More information on your rights can be found in our full privacy policy here.
If you have any questions or concerns about how we use your personal data, please contact our Data Protection Officer at DataProtectionOfficer@est.org.uk.
If you feel that we have not responded appropriately you any requests in relation to your rights, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
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