Privacy policy

Last updated: 23 March 2024

Introduction

Energy Helper (helper.energy) is owned and run by Brakkn Ltd. In the remainder of this policy, references to ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’ refer to Brakkn Ltd.

We believe you have a fundamental right to privacy and we aim to do everything we can to protect your security. This privacy policy describes how we will treat, handle and protect your personal information as you interact with us online and offline. It explains how we collect, use, disclose and transfer the information that you provide to us over the telephone, by email, on our website or mobile applications and when you respond to our online and digital communications.

Please read the policy in full to make sure you understand how your personal information will be treated. It may change periodically, so please check back from time to time.

By visiting our site and providing us with your personal data, you acknowledge and accept this privacy policy. You can find out more about Energy Helper and the Terms of Use governing our site at https://helper.energy/terms-and-conditions/.

We welcome your comments about this policy. If you have any questions about how we use your personal data, please do not hesitate to contact us at:

Email: my.data@helper.energy
Telephone: 0800 249 4770

The bases upon which we process your data

We process your data at different times based upon one of two legal principles. There is more information about the lawful bases organisations may use for processing data on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

1. Legitimate interest

This occurs when the processing is necessary for our legitimate interests or the legitimate interests of a third party, and providing your own individual rights and freedoms do not override those interests. Examples of our legitimate interests include:

• Communicating with you in order to help you switch to a new supplier, or to help you understand and improve the energy performance of your home;
• Making sure that our marketing to you is tailored to your interests;
• Providing you with tailored energy advice;
• Generating an energy quote for you, and if you decide to proceed, initiating your switch to a new supplier;
• Maintaining accurate user records (and where you have been introduced to us by a partner, helping that partner do the same);
• Understanding our impact and improving our services; and
• Fraud prevention.

What this means in practice is that we process your data based on legitimate interests when:

• It is necessary for us to process your data in order to deliver our services to you. For example, this includes providing you with information you may need to take a targeted approach to reducing your energy bills and carbon emissions; and
• You would reasonably expect us to process your data in this way. Examples of this include emailing you with additional information about switching to a cheaper tariff after you have registered on our site, or if you signed up with us on the recommendation of one of our partners, passing your details back to that partner so that they can continue to communicate with you about switching to clean energy; or
• Your interests and our interests are aligned. For example, if you have registered on our site in order to get access to our advice and guidance about lowering your energy bills, we judge that us communicating with you in order to provide you with solutions for achieving this is in both of our interests. Similarly, if you sign up with us through a partner, we may pass your details back to that partner to allow them to remove you from any follow-up communication aimed at people who haven’t yet responded to their communications about switching. This avoids you receiving unnecessary communications from them.

You have the right to object to this processing. If you wish to do so please email us at my.data@helper.energy. Please bear in mind that if you object this may affect our ability to carry out tasks above for your benefit.

Consent and legitimate interests
Under the Privacy and Electronics Communications Regulations (PECR), you must have given consent for us to communicate with you by telephone or email even where we use legitimate interests as our lawful basis for processing your data. This is distinct from when we use consent as the lawful basis for processing your data (see below).

2. Consent

There may be some cases in which we judge that we need your consent as the legal basis for processing your data. In such cases, we will ensure that we ask for your consent in a way that is:

• prominent and separate to our terms and conditions;
• clear about why we want the data and what we’re going to do with it; and
• clear about who will be relying on your consent in order to process your data.

Where we use consent as the lawful basis for processing your data, you may withdraw your consent at any time by emailing my.data@helper.energy. We may take up to 72 hours to respond to your request.

What we collect

We obtain information about you in a range of ways:

Information you give us

We may collect your name, postal address, email address, phone number, demographic information (such as your gender, occupation or size of household), energy metering information including the unique identifier for any home display you have connected to your smart meter(s), copies of energy bills, as well as other information you directly give us on our site. In addition, we may also collect personal information from you when you correspond with us (for example, when you send us e-mail communications or letters, or by telephone).

Information we get from others

We may get information about you from other sources including N3RGY DATA LIMITED (see ‘Smart meter data‘ below), Google, Facebook, Jotform or Gravity Forms (which we use for some of the forms on our site), energy suppliers, or partners who introduce you to us. We may add the information we get from others to information we get from this site and which you may provide to us.

Information automatically collected

We automatically log information about you and your computer. For example, when visiting our site, we log your computer operating system type, browser type, browser language, the website you visited before browsing to our site, pages you viewed, how long you spent on a page, access times and information about your use of and actions on our site.

Smart meter data

Where we use your smart meter data to provide more accurate and insightful estimates and guidance, we work with N3RGY DATA LIMITED (https://n3rgy.com) to interface with national smart meter systems in order to collect, store and manage your smart meter data. We (Brakkn Ltd), N3RGY DATA LIMITED and its parent, N3RGY LIMTED, are all parties to the Smart Energy Code  (https://smartenergycodecompany.co.uk/). N3RGY LIMITED is incorporated and registered in England and Wales with the company number 11203504 and its registered office is at 4 Ovington Drive, Fleet, United Kingdom, GU51 1DF.

We will always ask for your consent before we first access your smart meter data. By providing your consent, you give us permission to access, store and process your energy consumption, generation and tariff information with a granularity of 30 minute intervals. We will never access your smart meter data more frequently than is necessary. The following information will be requested:

• Energy consumption and generation information for both gas and electricity (where available);
• Energy tariff information including the price(s) you are charged for energy consumed; and
• Information identifying the energy meter (number, location, type).

N3RGY DATA LIMITED provides full visibility and control of the information you have shared with us (and any other businesses you may have separately given consent to who use N3RGY DATA LIMITED for smart meter access) via a consumer portal (https://data.n3rgy.com/consumer). You can use their consumer portal to:

• Review which organisations you have granted access to;
• Download a copy of your data held by n3rgy data limited; and
• Withdraw consent for any or all of the organisations listed.*

Once you first consent to Brakkn (or another N3RGY DATA LIMITED customer) accessing your smart meter data, all consumption, generation and tariff information gathered by N3RGY DATA LIMITED is cleared of all personal identifiable data (anonymised) and pooled within a data set which is made available to all organisations who use the n3rgy data limited service. This enables N3RGY DATA LIMITED and its customers to better understand the way energy is used, generated and paid for, creating opportunities to further improve the UK’s energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. Due to the nature of anonymisation used, it is not possible to identify your data from this wider set, and therefore to remove your contribution.

Cookies

Our site (like most platforms) uses cookies and other similar technology such as ‘web beacons’. To learn more about how we use them, please see our cookies policy.

Pixel tags

We may also use pixel tags (which are also known as web beacons and clear GIFs) on our site to track the actions of users on our site. Unlike cookies, which are stored on the hard drive of your computer or mobile device by a website, pixel tags are embedded invisibly on webpages. Pixel tags measure the success of our marketing campaigns and compile statistics about usage of the site at an aggregate level, so that we can manage our content and promote the site more effectively. The information we collect using pixel tags is not linked to our users’ personal data.

IP addresses

We may collect information about your computer or mobile device, including where available your IP address, operating system, log in times and browser type. We use this information to better understand how visitors use our site and for internal reporting purposes. We may anonymise and share this information with advertisers, sponsors and/or other businesses.

How we use your data

We may use your personal data for the purposes shown below. The lawful basis for processing your data is indicated in italics in each case – for more on what is meant by these terms, see the section above on ‘the basis upon which we process your data’. Where we rely on consent as the lawful basis for processing your data and have not yet secured this consent from you, we will not process your data in that way.

We may use your data to:

• operate, maintain, and improve our sites, products and services. This may include:
  • analysing the energy performance of your home and providing you with information on the ways in which it could be improved – legitimate interests in most cases, or consent where we are using your smart meter data;
  • sharing your data with ONZO Limited or its parent company Green Energy Options Limited in order to run disaggregation analysis on your smart meter data to improve the insights we can offer you – legitimate interests;
  • providing you with tailored information and guidance relating to energy in your home – legitimate interests or consent depending on which data is used;
  • sharing your data with MyUtilityGenius Limited and with clean energy suppliers for the purposes of generating clean energy quotes and facilitating your switch – legitimate interests;
  • receiving data from MyUtilityGenius Limited and from clean energy suppliers about your switch application if you choose to switch through us – legitimate interests; and
  • contacting you by telephone, where you have provided us with your telephone number, in order to get feedback and assist you or your organisation in reducing your energy consumption or switching to renewable electricity tariffs – legitimate interests;
• process and deliver competition entries and rewards – legitimate interests;
• respond to comments and questions and provide customer service – legitimate interests;
• send information including confirmations, invoices, technical notices, updates, security alerts and support and administrative messages – legitimate interests;
• communicate with you about promotions, upcoming events, and other news about products and services offered by us and our selected partners – consent;
• to link or combine user information with other personal data, including to identify other people who may also be interested in our products and services – legitimate interests;
• to allow a partner that may have referred you to us to communicate with you more effectively – legitimate interests or consent, depending on how the data are used;
• to protect, investigate, and deter against fraudulent, unauthorized, or illegal activity – legitimate interests; and
• to provide and deliver additional products and services at your request – consent.

Limiting access to your personal data

Our overarching principle is that we will restrict access to your data to the minimum number of people and organisations required to provide our service and comply with the law. To be clear, we will never share personal information about you with other people or organisations except where we have to do so to provide our services or to comply with the law. Specifically, we may share your data:

• With those who need it to do work for us in order to provide our services to you or market our services to other users, or whose services we use in managing and maintaining our data records.
• During the sale or transfer of all or substantially all of our business or assets. This includes through a merger, financing, acquisition, or bankruptcy transaction or proceeding. In these events we will take steps to ensure that the purchasing or contracting organisation(s) carry the same obligations and responsibilities in terms of holding and processing of personal data as are set out in this policy.
• For legal, protection, and safety purposes:
  • to comply with laws or any regulatory obligation;
  • to respond to lawful requests and legal processes;
  • to protect the rights and property of Brakkn Ltd, our agents, customers and others. This includes enforcing our agreements, policies and Terms of Use.
  • in an emergency. This includes protecting the safety of our employees and agents, our customers, or any person.

Third parties we use on our site

We use third party services for some of our site’s functionality, as well as to help us monitor our performance and improve. Below is a list of the third parties who we use on this website, together with what we use them for. For a list of which third parties may place cookies, please see our cookies policy.

Third party	Purpose of processing
Flourish	Data visualisation
Google Analytics	We use Google Analytics to enable us to track performance and improve our website.
Gravity Forms	Collecting information from you that we need to provide our services.
Indigo Tree	We partner with Indigo Tree to develop this site.
Jotform	Collecting information from you that we need to provide our services.
n3rgy	Accessing smart meter data, where we have your consent to do so.
Onzo	Disaggregating smart meter data, where we have your consent to do so.

Sending personal data outside the European Economic Area

We have been working hard to restrict the suppliers we work with to ensure that they all store and process your data either within the European Economic Area, or in territories that have been formally recognised as having  regulatory frameworks that guarantee the same protections and safeguards that apply under the UK GDPR. This recognition is known as an ‘adequacy decision’. On the rare occasions when we need to use a supplier that is in a territory not covered by an adequacy decision, we ensure that appropriate contractual mechanisms are employed, such as the standard contractual clauses covered by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office ‘International Data Transfer Agreement’. For more information on this, please see the UK Information Commissioner’s Office guidance, here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/international-transfers/international-transfers-a-guide/

If you sign up though one of our partners

We often work with partner organisations to help their stakeholders improve the energy performance of their home, including, but not restricted to, their employees, customers, members, supporters, viewers, readers or listeners. In those cases, users are provided with a dedicated registration link, or provided with access through ‘single sign-on’ functionality via an employee portal or similar site. If you sign up via a partner:

• We ask you to provide a unique identifier such as staff ID or work email address when registering and may share this with the organisation that referred you to help them to understand take-up and to allow them to communicate with you effectively about our services.
• We may share information at an aggregate level about users’ interaction with our services where those users have been referred to us by that partner. This could include the frequency with which users visit our website, or the amount of time they spend on the site. We will never share this with any partner in a way that identifies the usage patterns of individuals without first securing your explicit consent.
• In those cases where you have provided energy consumption data to us, either directly or via permission to access your smart meter data, we will never share this with the partner who referred you in a format that allows it to be linked to you personally without first securing your explicit consent, although we may share aggregate data – for example by giving them average consumption data across a large cohort of employees.
• Where you provide us with additional information about your home – in order to generate an energy reduction action plan, for instance – we may share aggregate data with a partner summarising the responses given by all of the users referred by them. We will never share your specific answers with them in a way that allows you to be identified or them to be identified as pertaining to you.

Should we identify a need to share your data outside of the circumstances outlined above, we will secure your consent to this in advance of sharing your data in this way.

Protecting your information

We want you to feel confident about using the Energy Helper site, and we are committed to protecting the personal information we collect. We limit access to personal information about you to employees who reasonably need access to it in order to do their jobs. We have appropriate technical and organisational physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect the personal information that you provide to us against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, damage or destruction.

Retention period

We will retain your personal data for the period necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in this policy unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law. This may vary depending upon the purpose for which the data is stored and processed. The maximum period we will retain your data for with no active processing is five years.

How to edit, delete or access your personal data

You have the right to ask for a copy of any personal information that we hold about you in our records, to correct any inaccuracies and to update any out of date information. You can also ask us not to send you direct marketing communications. If you wish to exercise any of these rights, or wish to object to our use of your personal information, please email: my.data@helper.energy or write to the address listed below.

Changes to this policy

From time to time we may change this policy. If we make any changes, we will change the Last Updated date above. If you do not agree to these changes, please do not continue to use our site. If material changes are made to this policy, we will notify you by email or by placing a prominent notice on the site.

Your rights under the Data Protection Act

The collection and use of personal information on this site is in accordance with the Data Protection Act. Please visit the Information Commissioner’s Office for further information about this Act at: ico.org.uk.

Questions and contact details

If you have any questions relating to this policy, please address them to:
Jon Fletcher, Data Privacy Officer
Brakkn Ltd trading as Energy Helper
14a Commercial Road
Bournemouth
BH2 1RT

Tel: 0800 249 4770
Email: my.data@helper.energy.

If you are not satisfied with our response to your concern, you may wish to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office.

* If consent is withdrawn from all organisations, N3RGY DATA LIMITED will also remove all of your identifiable data from their platforms.