We value and respect your information

At PV Generation, it is our duty that your privacy is protected. This privacy policy applies to the PV Generation business, which is run by PV Generation, the data controller. PV Generation is a trading name of “PV Generation Ltd”, a company registered in Ireland with company number 571563. When we refer to “PV Gen”, “PV Generation”, “PV Generation Ltd”, “we”, “us”, and “our”, we mean PV Generation Ltd, the data controller. By “you” we mean any individual, that secures services from us, utilizes our website, or otherwise communicates with PV Generation. Throughout its duty as data controller, PV Generation maintains contact with multiple Data Processers to process personal data on its behalf. The data processors include: The Lead Generator, SEAI (Ireland’s national sustainable authority), Mail Chimp, Microsoft (Emails), and TrustPilot (Reviews). When we mention “third parties” we mean any of these listed above in addition to any new third parties in line with this policy. Read this privacy policy very carefully as it provides significant information on how we manage your personal information. If you have any issues regarding this notice, please contact us using the information set out in section 10. This privacy policy is split into the subsequent sections:

 

1. What info do we collect and how do we use it?

2. How do we use your personal information?

3. What information do we receive from third party services?

4. How do we use your sensitive information?

5. Legal bases for processing

6. Who do we share your personal data with?

7. How will we change this privacy policy?

8. What choices and rights do you have in relation to your personal information?

9. How long do we hold onto personal information?

10. How to contact us?

 

1. What info do we collect and how do we use it?

We, (PV Generation) or third parties on our behalf, collect your personal information when you use our website, contact us by phone, letter, email, social media, or in person, receive our merchandise and/or services, or request to join schemes which you are entitled to. We may collect the following information:

  • Your name
  • Billing address
  • Supply address
  • Telephone numbers
  • E-mail addresses
  • Date of birth
  • Details of a second contact (e.g., name, phone number & billing address)
  • Energy usage
  • Financial information (e.g., bank account details).
  • Personal requirements and lifestyle, including details of any vulnerabilities.
  • Survey responses
  • Details needed for an SEAI Grant
  • Your Meter Point Reference Number (MPRN)
  • Details necessary to claim Tax relief under the Home Renovation Incentive Scheme.
  • Your Local Property Tax Number (LPT)
  • If you visit our website, we store your IP address, the browser software you use and your behaviour on our website (for example, the information you click). This info is collected through cookies. More information about how we use cookies can be found in our cookies policy below.
  • If you engage with us through social media, we store your name on our CRM, which we combine the details of your previous correspondence with us, so we are updated in relation to your needs.
  • If we, or third-party suppliers, carry out a home visit, we may collect personal information about you or a member of your household from the visit. E.g., we may record information that has been supplied to us and obtained fairly about you.
  • If you proceed with a site survey with us, we create and record customer ID numbers for you and record the date of the initial contact as well as proceeding correspondence. We need this personal information so we can provide services and/or products to you.

2. How do we use your personal information?

PV Generation or our third parties will, collect, use and store the personal information collected about you to: (a) Provide, or acquire on your behalf, relevant products and/or services, and rewards; (b) Reply to any queries you have; (c) Identify you; (d) Contact you, or authorised third parties, in respect to our services and/or products and services,(e) Train our employees and continue to improve our products and service, which can mean that we tend to monitor and document communications that we have with you including phone conversations, emails, SMSs and web chats; (f) Conduct, and contact you in relation to, market research e.g. through customer surveys; (g) Acquire government funding for the supply of energy efficiency products to individuals; (h) Identify offers and advice modified to your needs or lifestyle; (i) Ensure the health and safety of customers and our staff; (j) Make decisions regarding the products and/or services and terms and conditions that we are able to offer to you; (k) Make personal estimations about the amount of energy you are likely to use in a certain period and the predicted production a solar system may give in any period of time; (l) Use data obtained from your visit to our website for admin purposes; for troubleshooting, info analysis, testing, analysis; to confirm content is presented in an good manner; and to authorize you to participle in interactive features; (m) Reply to and/or resolve any queries or request you may have on social media; (n) Authorize internal corporate reporting, business administration, adequate insurance coverage, the security of company facilities, research and development, and to identify and implement business efficiencies; (o) Abide with any procedures, laws and rules – including where we fairly consider it is in our (or other) legitimate interests; (p) Marketing communications with your consent, we may contact you by phone, by email or SMS with information on products, services and rewards at the time we collect your information. We may use third parties to send marketing communications also. Otherwise, you’ve got to ask us not to, we might also use your email address to show you advertisements through your social media newsfeed, or on search engine results pages. Except if you have asked us not to, we may profile your information to provide you with marketing and offers relevant to you. If you opt out of profiling, we will still run analysis that includes your information. You will be sent generic marketing information that may not be relevant to you. To opt out of receiving marketing messages, or to reject our use of profiling for marketing purposes, contact us any time using the details in section 10.

We take precautions to protect your information. When you submit sensitive information via the website, your information is protected both online and offline.

Wherever we collect sensitive information, that information is encrypted and transmitted to us in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a lock icon in the address bar and looking for “https” at the beginning of the address of the Web page.

While we use encryption to protect sensitive information transmitted online, we also protect your information offline. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, visiting premises or customer service) are granted access to personally identifiable information. The computers/servers in which we store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure environment.

3. What information do we receive from third party sources?

We tend to receive your personal information from the subsequent third-party sources: (a) Credit reference or fraud prevention agencies (b) Data providers – we acquire information from third party data providers. These customer insights assist us to set up our marketing activities and manage marketing research and business development; (c) Councils, local authorities, or housing associations – we may receive personal information including; your name, address and contact details where they like carbon-saving measures applied to your property under government funding schemes; (d) Letting agents, landlord, cohabitants or previous tenants – if you’ve recently moved into a property that we provide energy to (e) PV Generation Limited – for internal admin purposes such as ensuring delivery of our services to our customers; and (f) Third parties (such as price comparison websites) to set up an account for you and to supply the products and/services that you have requested.

4. How do we use your sensitive information?

We treat the information that we collect about you (or a member of your household’s) requirements for your well-being (e.g., due to age, health, disability, or financial circumstances) as being extremely sensitive. We will use this information in the following ways: (a) provide products and/or services to you in the most accommodating way e.g., if you require large print; (b) manage employees and third-party contractors; (c) provide you with the foremost customer experience where you attend a PV Generation event. With your consent, we may also share this information with the following individuals or organisations: (a) or other organisations, such as emergency responders or local authorities, which can provide support in an emergency.

5. Legal Bases for Processing?

We’ve evaluated that the legal bases for using your personal information as set out in this notice: (a) Contract – our use of your personal information is necessary to carry out our obligations under any contract we have with you; or (b) Legal Obligations – our use of your personal information is required from complying with our legal obligations; or (c) Our Legitimate Interests – to: (i) Develop our business; (ii) Increase the security of our network and information systems; (iii) Ensure that our processes, procedures and systems are as efficient as possible; (iv) Obtain a better understand how people interact with our website; (v) Analyse and enhance the information we collect; (vii) Determine the success of our promotional campaigns and advertising; and (vii) Enhance, personalise or otherwise improve our services and communications for the benefit of our customers. If you have any concerns about the processing activities based on our legitimate interests, please see section 10. Consent – we rely on your consent to use personal information to send you marketing information by post, phone, mobile phone, email, or SMS. If you later change your mind, you may withdraw your consent by contacting us using the details in section 10 and we will stop using your information this way.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

6. Who do we share your personal information with?

We will share your personal information with the ensuing categories of third parties: (a) our third-party suppliers, partners and sub-contractors that provide, review and/or receive services in relation to our website, services and/or products, which include: payment processors; suppliers of technical, support and installation services; insurers; logistics providers; security providers; cloud services providers; research agencies; and if you are entitled to claim government funding for energy efficiency measures, installers, energy performance assessors and sales advisors. (b) any company that is part of PV Generation; (c) where appropriate, family members or cohabitants, previous tenants, who/which may require information about you or your premises, or who introduced you to PV Generation; (d) if we’re under a duty to disclose your information to comply with any legal obligation, government or law enforcement officials as may be required to meet national security or law enforcement requirements or prevent legal activity; (e) regulators or other appointed bodies (such as CRU/UR) for legal or regulatory purposes, e.g. if requested we may send your information to CRU to prove that you qualify for relevant government funded schemes; (f) companies or partner organisations which provide services in relation to, or use information as part of, market research; (g) third parties that help us with advertising and marketing. For example, we share limited personal information with the following third parties who serve advertising on their platforms or on our behalf on external platforms: Facebook, Google Adwords and Mail Chimp, (h) authorised third parties or named account holders on any account you hold with us; (i) if we sell, merge or perform any internal re-organisations in relation to any of our (or any third parties) business or assets, the personal information will be one of the transferred assets to the relevant buyer and/or new data controller of such business or assets (j) any third party where required to: (i) enforce or apply our terms and conditions or any other agreement or to respond to any claims, to protect our rights or the rights of a third party, to protect the safety of any person or to prevent any illegal activity; and (ii) protect the rights, property or safety of PV Generations, our staff, customers or others.

7. How will we change this privacy notice?

We may update our privacy notice from time to time. Any changes we make to our privacy policy will be posted on the PV Generation website and, where appropriate, notified to you by email.

8. What choices and rights do you have in relation to your personal information?

8.1 You may contact us using the contact details in section 10 to request that we: (a) confirm that your personal information is being processed; (b) provide you with further details about how we process your personal information; (c) provide you with a copy of any personal information which we hold about you; (d) where we rely on your consent as a legal basis to justify using your personal information, withdraw your consent to that use; (e) consider any valid objection to the processing of your personal information (including the right to object to processing where we are relying on our legitimate interests as a legal basis for processing; (f) ask us to update or delete personal data which we hold about you; (g) restrict the way that we process your personal data; (h) provide you with a copy of your data in a machine-readable format. Where technically feasible and (i) where we carry out automated decision-making that has legal or similarly significant effects on you, ensure that we manually review that decision, provide an explanation of that decision and/or consider your appeal of that decision. 8.2 We will consider all those requests. However, certain personal information may be exempt from those requests in certain circumstances, which may include needing to keep processing your personal information for our legitimate interests or to comply with a legal obligation. 8.3 If an exemption applies, we will tell you this when responding to your request. We may ask you to provide us with information necessary to confirm your identity before responding.

9. How long do we hold onto your personal information?

9.1 We keep personal information for no longer than is necessary of the purposes for which the personal information is processed. The length of time we retain it for depends on the purposes for which we use it and/or as required to comply with applicable laws and to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights. 9.2 This means that some of your personal information will be kept for a short time e.g., we may keep copies of correspondence. Other information may be kept for a longer period, e.g., we keep your contact details for a period of up to seven years when you do not fully proceed with solar (but for a shorter period if that is possible).

10. How can you contact us?

10.1 If you would like to contact us in relation to your rights or if you are unhappy with how we’ve handled your information, you may contact us by calling our office at 047 790 78. 10.2 If you would like to contact our Data Protection Officer you may do so using the following details: you can send us a letter to: Data Protection Officer PV Generations, Scotstown Business Centre, Carrowhatta, Scotstown, Co. Monaghan H18 FH36. 11.3 If you’re not satisfied with our response to any complain or believe our processing of your information does not comply with data protection law, you can make a complaint to the relevant Data Protection Office: Data Protection Commissioner Dublin Office; 21 Fitzwilliam Square Dublin 2 D02 RD28 Data Protection Commissioner Portarlington Office Canal House Station Road Portarlington Co. Laois R32 AP23

What are cookies?

A cookie is a piece of data stored by a website within a browser, and then subsequently sent back to the same website by the browser

Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember things that a browser had done there in the past, which can include having clicked particular buttons, logging in, or having visited certain pages.

Cookies cannot carry viruses. They are used to perform essential functions on our website. Removing them could impact your experience when using websites.

How do we use cookies?

The cookies used on our website can be broken down into four categories:

  • Functional.
  • Tracking
  • Personalisation
  • Third Party

What can you do?

You can delete cookies stored on your computer or change your privacy settings at any time via your browser settings.

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© 2024 PV Generation. All rights reserved

If you feel that we are not abiding by this privacy policy, you should contact us immediately via telephone at 047 790 78 or via email at info@pvgeneration.ie

Last updated: 15/08/2024