Electric Kiwi Privacy Policy
Effective from 7 August 2024 for new Electric Kiwi customers joining on or after 7 August 2024, and from 7 September 2024 for existing Electric Kiwi customers as at 6 August 2024.
Here, at Electric Kiwi, we are committed to protecting your personal information. We have created this Policy to help you understand how and why we collect information from you, how we store it, how you can access and correct that information, and when we might disclose information to other people.
- When this Policy applies
- Types of personal information
- When we collect personal information
- What happens if you do not provide your personal information
- How we use your personal information
- Who we disclose your personal information to
- Third party links
- Use of cookies
- Tracking and measurement on Website and App
- Online Advertising
- Where where transfer, store and process your personal information
- How we protect your personal information
- Security of credit card information
- What happens if there’s a privacy breach
- How long we keep your personal information
- How you can request access to, and correction of, your personal information
- Changes to the Policy
- How you can make a privacy complaint
This Policy is provided for your information and doesn’t limit or exclude your rights under the Privacy Act 2020 and the Telecommunications Information Privacy Code 2020.
In this Policy:
- "we", "our", "us" refers to Electric Kiwi Limited and related companies.
- "you" refers to one of our mobile, broadband or electricity customers, prospective customers, an individual who has provided us with personal information (eg when entering one of our competitions or surveys), a person authorising someone else's Electric Kiwi account, an employee or contractor whose employer or client is our customer, a person who calls or texts an Electric Kiwi customer, and a user of our products, services, and/or website.
1. When this Policy applies
1.1
This Policy applies whenever you:
- contact us or we contact you;
- sign up for and/or use our products/services (including our mobile and landline services, broadband, websites and apps); and
- otherwise share your personal information with us.
This Policy forms part of the applicable product and/or service terms and conditions that you agree to when you sign up for such product and/or service.
2. Types of personal information
2.1 Personal information is any information that can be used to identify you. For example:- Your name, email address, residential address, telephone number, gender association and date of birth.
- Documents that verify your identity and other personal details, such as your passport or driver's licence. We may also ask for images of yourself with your ID for higher risk transactions such as SIM Swaps. These images are deleted within 24 hours and not used for any other purpose than verifying the requestor of the specific service.
- Your employment details.
- Health and medical information if you or a member of your household is a vulnerable or medically dependent consumer.
- Information you provide when you call, email, or live chat with us.
- Financial information, including credit history and bank account or credit card numbers.
- Preference information and marketing preferences.
- Details of your device, browser, domain name and IP address, and the details of any website you linked from to the Website or App.
- How you use your phone and other services/products, such as call and/or text message information.
- Technical and service information about your device and how your device interacts with our networks, products and services, including the amount of data and minutes used and what you’ve used the service for (eg whether you’ve streamed music or browsed the web)
3. When we collect personal information
3.1
We may collect personal information from you in various ways including from (but not limited to):
- information submitted to Electric Kiwi by you through your use of the Website, App or Social Media.
- information on your browsing activity when using the Website, App or Social Media;
- any communication with Electric Kiwi directly via writing, phone calls (which may be recorded) email, direct messaging or live web chat.
- information obtained through your use (or prospective use) of the services including your engagement in promotions and surveys.
- When you buy, share or use our products and services (eg call and text message details including date, time, content, duration, and contact number), as well as your browsing activity when using our internet services, such as websites visited, your IP address, session start and end times, and accessed content on our online content service. We may also monitor your mobile device location periodically and track your spending.
3.2
We may supplement the information you provide us with information we collect from third parties including:
- third parties who are involved in the supply of your services , including your electricity network operator, our mobile network provider, and our representatives.
- third parties who are involved in credit checking and debt recovery, including credit checking and debt recovery agencies, our representatives, our lawyers, and other telecommunication and electricity suppliers in New Zealand or their agents.
- third parties who maintain public databases or otherwise publish public information.
- third parties who we may need to contact to verify that you are, or a member of your household is, a vulnerable consumer or a medically dependent consumer, including your or a member of your household’s doctor, any District Health Board, the Ministry of Social Development, Work and Income New Zealand, Family and Community services or any other source trusted by us.
- third parties involved in any dispute organisation or scheme that we are a member of;
- any third party to whom we are required to disclose any information either by law or in compliance with industry codes and standards,
- and you authorise such third parties to provide your personal information to us for any of the purposes set out in this Policy.
3.3
We may also collect your personal information if we’re investigating alleged fraud. This includes information from the person alleging they’ve been defrauded, verification of your applicable identification from the relevant authority and confirmation of the courier delivery status and address from courier companies for deliveries of our products.
4. What happens if you do not provide your personal information
4.1
If you choose not to provide information when we ask for it, certain services and/or product features may not work properly and/or we may not be able to provide you with our products and services.
5. How we use your personal information
5.1
The information that we collect about you may be used for a number of purposes relating to our business, including:
- To process applications for services and any online transactions you make.
- To perform credit checking and scoring (if you have agreed).
- To monitor compliance with the terms and conditions of Electric Kiwi service(s) and product(s) you purchase and use, including our Fair Use Policy.
- To market our services to you, including contacting you electronically (for example, by text, email or an online messaging platform).
- To perform the services and any assistance required in connection with the services including invoicing.
- To contact you to ensure customer satisfaction in respect of our role as your service provider.
- To monitor, improve and administer the Website, App and Social Media.
- To respond and follow up on any queries, complaints or requests you might have made, and other customer care issues.
- To enable us to conduct promotions, surveys and market research, which includes analysing information pertaining to your use of the services, App, Social Media and Website.
- To enable us to comply with our contractual obligations to you and other third parties involved in the supply of services to you.
- To comply with with legal, governmental or regulatory agencies’ requests in connection with the regulation of telecommunications services, and in connection with any legal proceedings, crime or fraud prevention or detection, or prosecution.
- To monitor, detect and prevent fraudulent or illegal use of our services and networks
- To collect any outstanding monies that you may owe us.
- To verify any information that you give to us (or information that we may collect from other sources), including for the purposes of fraud prevention or compliance to the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009.
- To provide handset location information to emergency services including Fire, Police and Ambulance when you dial 111” so that they can readily locate you and the emergency quickly.
- For any other purpose authorised by you or the Privacy Act 2020.
5.2
We will only use any health information that you provide us, or that we collect from a third party, for the purpose of:
- verifying that you are, or a member of your household is, a vulnerable customer or a medically dependent consumer; and
- complying with our obligations under the Electricity Authority Guideline on Arrangements to Assist Medically Dependent Consumers and the Electricity Authority Guideline on Arrangements to Assist Vulnerable Consumers.
5.3
If you post messages directly or indirectly to our Website, Social Media or App or elsewhere, we may collect, keep and use the information in those messages in accordance with this Policy. If you commence the process to sign up on our Website or App to become our customer and you enter your contact details but you do not successfully complete the sign-up process, or your application is declined, we may contact you to see if we can help you complete the sign up process 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. We may also retain any information supplied by you in our database.
5.4
We reserve the right to use data (on an anonymous basis) in relation to your use of the Website, App, Social Media and services for marketing and accounting purposes.
5.5
You may request that we stop sending marketing or promotional messages at any time, by clicking the unsubscribe link in our marketing and promotional emails.
6. Who we disclose your personal information to
6.1
We may disclose your personal information to trusted third parties (some of whom may be located outside of New Zealand) for the purpose(s) (or directly related purpose(s)) outlined above under the section “how we use your personal information”.
- Agents, contractors, and advisors.
- Our related companies, who will only use and disclose your information for the same purposes as we do.
- Other network operators and telecommunication companies needed to provide and support the services we offer, including such as when you use your phone abroad.
- Credit reference agencies (with your consent) who may share your information with other organisations and keep a record of the searches conducted under your name.
- Debt collection agencies or companies, to collect any unpaid bills.
- Individuals or parties who pay for your services or products, such as your employer or account holder under group plans.
- Our advertisers, customers, potential customers, and associates, with whom we share anonymized, aggregated data that doesn't personally identify you.
- Entities we are legally required to provide your information to, including law enforcement agencies (e.g. police or Serious Fraud Office), emergency services, government departments, and regulatory authorities, as well as any person or organisation authorised to access your information under the Privacy Act 2020 and/or the Telecommunication Information Privacy Code 2020.
- Energy and telecommunications network and transmission system owners/operators for the purposes of operating the relevant network or to communicate with you;
- Any potential or actual assignees or transferees, such as a prospective buyer of our business.
- Suppliers who help us protect the operation of the network and systems, through monitoring and detection to identify potential threats like hacking, virus spreading, and other security concerns.
- Individuals you specifically request us to share your account information with. For example, if you authorise another person on your account, that person will have access to your personal information.
- Emergency services, including fire, police, and ambulance services.
- Other energy and telecommunications retailers and wholesalers (including where we are required to do so in accordance with industry reconciliation or switching rules).
7. Third party links
7.1
Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third-party products or services on our Website. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.
8. Cookies
8.1
Cookies are small pieces of information that can be stored on your hard drive (persistent cookies) or computer memory (session cookies). Cookies help us understand which parts of our Website are most popular, where our visitors are going, and how long they spend there.
8.2
We use cookies to learn how we can make our Website more useful and interesting for you. We use session cookies, which are used to remember specific information about your preferences for the duration of your session. When you log out or close your browser session, these cookies are deleted. We also use persistent cookies to personalise the user experience and for tracking traffic patterns to and from our Website. For more information on the tracking we use, refer to section 10 below.
9. Website and App tracking and measurement
9.1
We use third-party Website, App and Social Media trackers including but not limited to Google, Google Floodlight, Facebook and Bing to collect information on how you use our Website, App and/or Social Media. The services are used to aggregate statistics anonymously, such as number of page views, the number of unique visitors, time spent on our site, and to determine advertising effectiveness.
10. Online Advertising
10.1
We use third-party vendors, such as Google and Meta, to display advertising on websites across the internet. These third-party vendors may also use cookies to anonymously track and target advertising based on your browsing behaviour and past visits.
10.2
We use remarketing to similar audiences and demographics and interest reporting to gather information for online advertising which allows us to reach people who have previously visited our Website, and to match the right people with the right message. It could mean that we advertise to previous visitors who haven’t completed a task on our Website, for example those who have partially completed the sign up process. This could be in the form of an advertisement on the Google search results page, or a site in the Google Display Network, or via third-party vendors who show our advertisements across the internet.
10.3
You are able to opt out of certain online advertising in the following ways:
- You have the option to opt out of Google’s use of cookies by visiting the Google’s Ads Settings.
- Alternatively, you can opt out of third-party vendors' use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.
11. Where where transfer, store and process your personal information
11.1
We may transfer, store and process your personal information in New Zealand and overseas including using services provided by third-party service providers. That includes cloud service providers with data centres located outside of New Zealand. We take reasonable steps to ensure that these service providers are obligated to keep confidential any of your personal information that they receive and use.
12. How we protect your personal information
12.1
We take the security of your information seriously. We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information that we collect, use and/or disclose in accordance with the terms of this Policy is accurate, complete, up-to-date and stored in a secure environment protected from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.
12.2
Where images are requested via Live Chat for the purpose of ID verification, the Chat connection is encrypted and the upload passed through a virus checker before receipt by the Customer Experience person dealing with the request.
13. Security of credit card information
13.1
Your credit card information is transmitted using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol, which encrypts your information. Payments will be processed after your invoice is sent, or when validating your details. We do not keep your credit card details. Your full credit card details will be encrypted and securely stored by a PCI compliant third-party online payment provider.
14. What happens if there’s a privacy breach?
14.1
We have policies and procedures in place to identify, contain, evaluate, notify, and prevent the reoccurrence of privacy breaches. In the event that any privacy breach (or any suspected privacy breach) is discovered by or notified to us, we will immediately initiate a process of containment by taking whatever steps are reasonably possible in the circumstances to contain and mitigate the privacy breach. Depending on the nature of the privacy breach, we may get in touch with you, report to the Privacy Commissioner (or other regulatory body as required) and/or report the breach publicly.
15. How long we keep your personal information
15.1
Generally, we only keep your personal information for as long as necessary. Once the purpose for which it was originally collected is fulfilled, we either delete it or de-identify it to ensure it can no longer be linked back to you. For example:
- Billing records are kept for seven years.
- Text messages are securely stored for approximately six months to facilitate the verification and resolution of any delivery-related issues.
- If you are an Electric Kiwi customer, we may continue to hold, use, and share your information even after our agreement with you ends, and you cease being an Electric Kiwi customer. This allows us to address matters related to your former account and simplifies the process of reconnecting your account should you choose to rejoin us in the future.
16. How you can request access to, and correct of, my personal information
16.1
You can access personal information and access some of the personal information that we hold about you in the "Your Account" section of the Website or App. You may request access to all of the personal information that we hold about you by send a message via the ‘contact us’ link on our website or by writing to:
Privacy Officer
Electric Kiwi Limited
PO Box 106165
Auckland, 1143
New Zealand
Please quote your name, email address, phone number, and address, along with a brief description of the information you would like a copy of.
Before processing your request, we‘ll contact you to verify your identity, confirm your request and advise of any charges that may apply. Occasionally, we may withhold information on one of the grounds set out in the Privacy Act 2020 or the Telecommunications Information Privacy Code 2020. If we do not make the correction you are seeking to your personal information, you have the right to provide us with a statement of the correction you are seeking to your information, and request that we attach that statement to your information.
17 Changes to the Policy
17.1
We may change this Policy from time to time and we will tell you about a change in the Policy by posting an updated policy on our website. Any change we make applies from the date we post it on the website.
18. How you can make a privacy complaint
18.1
If you have a privacy-related complaint, please contact us through our Website. We’ll do our best to resolve the complaint quickly. If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your complaint, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.