Effective from 20 June 2011.

Privacy Act 1993 ("the Act")

If we hold personal information about you, we comply with the Act. This Privacy Policy sets out information about how we do that. Further information about privacy and your rights under the Act can be found at www.privacy.org.nz.

What information we collect and how we collect it

While you are a Powershop customer we will collect and hold personal information about you and your property. Powershop may collect information directly from you (including through our agents such as telemarketers), from our website, and from third parties who are involved in your electricity supply (such as your lines company, meter equipment owners and meter readers). We may collect information in a variety of ways e.g. through promotions, surveys, recordings of customer calls, sales calls, customer tickets, posts on our blog.

Use of your information

The information we hold about you and your property will be used to provide our services to you and for related purposes, for example:

• confirming your identity;
• supplying you with electricity and other services you have requested;
• carrying out credit checks or otherwise assessing your creditworthiness (we will tell you before we do this);
• communicating with you;
• complying with our obligations to you and other third parties involved in the supply of electricity to you and your property;
• debt collection;
• improving customer service;
• provide you with information on third party products and services;
• for our general business purposes, e.g. aggregating customer consumption information to track trends.

Powershop will not sell, lend, trade or otherwise disclose your personal information to any other person or agency except as set out in this privacy policy.

Disclosure of your information

Powershop will not share your personal information, except when:

• you tell us we can do this;
• we reasonably believe we are required to do so by law;
• we want to carry out a credit check to consider your credit worthiness. The credit agency may use or disclose any information you provide to others using their services. You can ask the credit agency for a copy of the information they hold about you;
• we need to do so to supply energy to you or it is a matter covered by our customer contract;
• we want to keep you informed about products or services;
• we want to recover money from you when you have not paid us, or if we want to list any payment defaults with a credit agency;
• you are switching to another energy retailer;
• the distribution company needs or has requested the information. Some examples of when we may do this are if the information is to help supply energy or to distribute money on their behalf;
• this is necessary to assist an adjudicator to resolve a complaint you make about us.

After you cease to be a customer we will still use your personal information for our general business purposes (such as in aggregated consumption data), to call you if you switch away to finalise your account and get your feedback, and if you owe us money we will still use your personal information to recover money from you or if we want to list any payment defaults with a credit agency.

Other than as outlined above, we will not share your information with anyone else. This includes information about the account with anyone living at the property, except if they are also named on the account. You may ask us for access to any personal information we hold about you. If you think that information is inaccurate or incorrect, you may ask us to consider correcting or deleting it from Powershop’s database. You can do this via the contact us page..

Storage and security of personal information

We will keep personal information secure. Most personal information will be held in our customer application. However some personal information will be held in our physical files at our offices or in our computer network. Our staff have unique user identifications and passwords. We regularly train our staff on their responsibilities under the Act. Our physical premises are protected by reasonable security precautions.

Storage and security of customer keys and alarm codes

Where Powershop’s meter readers cannot access your meter outside the building, they will leave behind a key pack at the property by which you can send the key to our meter readers. Each key pack left behind is allocated to a particular meter reader so that when you send it with the key it can be tracked. When our meter readers receive a key pack from you, they allocate a specific key number to the pack and dispatch it to the relevant local area office, where it is stored in a locked safe. At the local offices a log book is kept where authorised staff sign the keys in and out when they are required for meter reading. Keys can only be identified as relating to a customer or property on our meter readers’ key database, never on the actual key or key pack. Only authorised staff can access the key database.

If you have an alarm code that needs to be entered when meter readers use the key to your property, our key pack instructs customers to enter any alarm code in their account settings online. The alarm code is sent to our meter readers using encrypted files. Once received, the alarm codes are entered into the key database of our meter readers, which are only able to be accessed by authorised staff. The alarm code is also available electronically for a short period via a password-protected PDA (personal digital assistant) to meter readers who need the key when they are about to read the meter at your property. In some very limited instances the alarm code may be available in hard copy for our meter readers to use during their meter rounds.

If and when you wish to have your key returned or destroyed, our crew will (after verifying you as the customer) either return the key to an address that is different from the relevant property or destroy the key.

Email

Sometimes we send our customers information. We may do this by email. Some information you will always receive by email, such as notification about energy you have used, or notification under our customer terms. We may also send you by email newsletters or other information we think you may be interested in. Newsletters and other information you receive will have instructions for how you can remove yourself from that mailing list. If you ask to be removed from a mailing list, we will do this.

Your user name and password

If you are a Powershop customer, you are responsible for your user name, email address and password. Your user name and password can only be used in connection with purchasing products for the supply of energy to your property or properties. You should not tell anyone else your password or user name, and if you do, you are responsible for paying for energy they buy from us.

Card security

When you use your credit card on our website, the credit card information is transmitted using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol, this encrypts your information. Powershop keeps only some of your credit card details. However your full credit card details will be encrypted and securely stored by our online payment provider (currently Paystation Limited).

Make sure you always logout when you have finished using the Powershop website, especially if you access Powershop from a shared computer.

Cookies

A cookie is a small piece of information stored on your computer. Cookies help us improve your user-experience when you use our website.

The technology we use mostly uses "session" cookies. Session cookies expire after 30 minutes of no activity on the Powershop website. However some cookies we use for internet statistics last longer. See the section on ‘internet statistics’ below to find out the sorts of things we use the cookies to track.

Other information we collect

We collect other information to help us understand how our site is working and how we could improve it and/or our services. This may include URL of pages you visit or have visited, which operating system and browser you are using, your IP address, and the date and time of your visit.

While we may publish aggregated information of this sort, we will not publish information about individual machines, and we only disclose and use it as set out in this privacy policy. This includes disclosing it to the Police or other Government authorities if we think we are obliged to by law.

If you post messages to our website or Blog, we collect and may keep the information in those messages.

If you decide to try to sign up to become a Powershop customer and you enter your contact details but you do not successfully complete the sign-up process, we may contact you to see if we can help you finish signing up and/ or to get your feedback. If we do this, we will use the personal details you have entered on the sign up page to contact you.

Internet statistics

Powershop uses standard Google Analytic tools to collect visitor statistics such as the number of visitors on our site per day, which pages they visit, their computer’s internet protocol address and operating systems, times of the visit, browser type and language, and referring website addresses. The information we receive from Google Analytics does not identify individual users and we use this information to analyse trends, better configure our service and messages, track the performance of referring websites, administer our website and track users’ movements around our website. When Google Analytics receives personal information, that information is stored by Google in accordance with Google’s privacy policy available at http://www.google.com/privacy.html.

Changing this policy

We can change this privacy policy at any time. We will tell you about changes by posting an updated policy on our website, so we encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on privacy practices at Powershop. Changes apply 30 days from the date we post it on our website

If you have any questions about our privacy policies or any other matter, please contact us.