Introduction
This privacy policy provides information regarding the personal information which is processed by Powershop Australia Pty Limited (ABN 41 154 914 075) (‘Powershop’ or ‘we’) within the Shell group of companies (‘Shell’) in relation to how we, collect, use, disclose and store personal information. References to ‘us’, ‘we’ and ‘our’ in this policy are references to Powershop and its related entities.
We are committed to complying with Australia’s privacy laws, and in particular the Australian Privacy Principles (the APPs) as well as adhering to our obligations under Shell’s Binding Corporate Rules. The APPs are designed to protect your privacy by controlling how your personal information is handled when you provide it to other people, like us. Personal information is information or an opinion about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable (for example, your name and address).
Special Notice – if you are under 16 years old. Processing children’s personal information
We do not intentionally collect personal information of individuals under 16 years old. If you are under 16 years old (or a different age to reflect local legal requirement as communicated on the Powershop website), please do not send us your personal information, for example, your name, address and email address. If you wish to contact Powershop in a way which requires you to submit your personal information, please get your parent or guardian to do so on your behalf.
Information we collect
The types of information we collect depends on how you use our products and services.
Users of our websites
We may collect information relating to your usage of our websites, including the pages that you view, when you visit our websites and for how long, and any referring website’s address. We also collect your IP address and information about the device you have visited our websites with, including the operating system, browser type and language setting of the device. Our websites contain links to websites owned and operated by third parties. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these third parties and you should read their privacy policies before using their websites.
Powershop customers
If you are a Powershop customer or prospective customer, in addition to the website usage information described above, we may collect your full name, your date of birth, your address (including any separate mailing address), email address, telephone number, concession details (if applicable), health information (if applicable, for example if life support equipment is used at your address), payment details, ABN (if applicable) and other financial and credit related information. We may also collect information about the property we supply energy or other services to, including the energy consumption at the property, and any services or equipment at the property and which are connected to the services we provide you (for example, solar installations) along with other information about our network and services and how you use them.
We may also collect information you provide to us or which is otherwise generated in the course of interacting with us, including:
information on how you use our mobile application or any other application we make available to you, including the name and brand of your mobile device and its operating system version, screen resolution and unique device key;
information you provide to us when you contact us regarding our services;
information you post on our blog or provide through social media or any other platform we make available for your use; and
information you provide when you respond to our marketing or research requests.
How we collect information from you
We may collect information about you:
directly from you (for example over the phone or when you complete an application form, see below for more information);
from our website and mobile applications, social media and other digital platforms, to the extent you use and provide information to them;
from third parties who are or were involved in the supply of energy to you (such as your distribution company, previous energy provider or metering data provider);
from third parties who provide services to us (including technology, administrative and operational services) or who provide marketing lists or other information services;
from our third party sales partners;
from credit reporting agencies; and
from our related entities within the Shell Group and our white label partners and other business partners.
We may collect information directly from you when you:
sign up to become a Powershop customer (or partially complete the sign-up process – see Partial Sign-ups below);
contact us with a query about our services;
interact with our sales representatives;
use our mobile application or any other application we make available to you, including our customer live-chat application;
interact with our website, social media or any technology platform we make available to you;
respond to our marketing or research requests; and
give us your information for any other reason, such as when we have an activation at an event.
If you do not provide, or permit us to collect, all relevant personal information we may not be able to provide you with all of our products and services. Further specific details about how we use certain information may be provided in a dedicated collection statement made available to you at the time that we collect that information.
If you provide us with personal information about a third party, you are responsible for ensuring that you have been properly authorised by that third party to provide that personal information to us for the purposes contemplated in this privacy policy.
Shell view of the customer
With the aim of ensuring you have a seamless experience with the Shell group and depending upon the nature of your engagement with Shell, we may combine information gathered from the sources referred to above to create a personal profile of you. This enables you to interact with different Shell companies more easily and ensures we have the most up to date information about you in order to better develop services and products and to tailor offers relevant to your specific interests.
Please note however, you have the ability to control how Shell uses this information. You can opt out of having your personal information combined in this way.
Cookies
We use cookies to improve your user experience when you use our websites. We use mostly use ‘session’ cookies which expire after a period of inactivity on our website. However, some cookies we use for internet statistics or remarketing last longer. It is possible to disable the acceptance of cookies by your web browser. However, doing so may restrict your ability to access some web pages.
We may undertake targeted marketing through third party channels based on your interactions with Powershop’s website. Third-party providers may use cookies to show Powershop ads to you as you visit websites on the internet. These activities will be subject to the third-party’s own privacy policies, which we encourage you to read – for more information, please refer to the Powershop Cookie Policy.
When we will use your information
We collect and use your personal information and information about your property for the purposes of:
confirming your identity and fraud prevention;
supplying you with energy and other services you have requested;
carrying out credit checks or otherwise assessing your creditworthiness and in relation to credit reporting (see our credit reporting policy for more information);
creating and managing your account and our products and services;
communicating with you including responding to your queries and notifying you about changes to our products and services;
complying with our obligations to you and other third parties involved in the supply of energy to you and your property;
receiving payments and performing debt collection;
improving our customer service;
improving and developing our products and services, including by collecting information that helps us understand how you and our other customers use our services and applications and to track our performance and your interactions with us;
marketing our products and services;
governance and compliance including complying with our regulatory and legal obligations;
assessing the suitability of job applicants for employment;
providing you with information on our services, or those of our third-party partners;
exchanging information with related entities, our white label and other business partners and other businesses we work with;
performing general business activities in support of providing our services; and
carrying out customer screening on a periodic basis to comply with legal and regulatory obligations to ensure Shell can comply with anti-money laundering and/or bribery and corruption laws and other regulatory requirements. This screening takes place against publicly available or government issued sanctions lists and media sources. The screening does not involve profiling or automated decision making in relation to you.
We may aggregate and publish information about customer usage of our services, website, mobile and other digital platforms, and your usage information may form part of that aggregate information. However, we will not publish information that can be connected to you or any other customer.
Powershop is the credit provider for customers who purchase energy from our white label partners. Consequently, we will use your personal information, to determine your creditworthiness for products and services offered by or through them.
Marketing
We may sometimes send you information about our products and services and those of third parties including our business partners and for other marketing activities. If you wish to stop receiving such materials you can opt out by clicking on the unsubscribe link in our marketing emails or using other opt out mechanisms we provide. Please be aware that if you opt out of marketing communications, we will still send you important messages about our services. For example, messages about safety or the administration of your account.
Partial sign-ups
If you commence but do not successfully complete the sign-up process to with us, we may use the contact details you have provided to contact you to help you complete your sign-up and/or to get your feedback.
Use of your information if you leave us
If you choose to no longer be a Powershop customer, we may use information we hold about you to:
call you if you switch away, in order to finalise your account and get your feedback; and
if you owe us money, recover money from you or to take action in relation to a payment default in accordance with our credit reporting policy.
Use of information that is no longer required
If we no longer require your personal information for any of the purposes for which it was collected, we will take reasonable steps to either destroy your personal information or ensure that it is de-identified. We may use de-identified information for our general business activities.
Disclosure of your information
We may disclose your personal information to:
your authorised representatives or a secondary account holder;
law enforcement and national security agencies and other government and regulatory authorities where required or permitted to do so by law;
other companies within the Shell group of companies, including to those which may be located outside of Australia;
our related entities, our white label and other business partners and other businesses we work with including parties who provide products and services to us such as third parties who assist us in managing and developing our technology, products, services and business including contractors, technology service providers, business intelligence and analysis providers, marketing services providers (including market research, telemarketing and door knocking service providers), business advisers, financiers, investors and credit related reporting agencies and authorised third parties who carry out relevant background and screening checks on behalf of us;
prospective or actual purchasers of all or part of our business;
other people where you give us permission to do so or where otherwise required or permitted by law;
other energy suppliers such as other energy retailers (eg when you are switching energy retailers) or distribution companies;
third parties in relation to responding to or resolving a complaint or credit issue.
In some cases, the people we disclose your information to may be located outside Australia. For example, we use cloud service providers to store information and use sales partners with operational centres located overseas. These third parties run global businesses across many countries besides Australia. As an indication, the countries in which these third parties are located include New Zealand, Singapore, the United States of America, India, the Philippines and the European Economic Area. In all cases, we take steps to protect the security of any information we transmit overseas.
Storage and security of your information
Other than as specified above, the personal information we collect is usually stored and processed in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. We securely store and protect all personal information we collect. Our premises are secured by controlled entry, and all employees have role-based access to our systems. Our employees are trained on our obligations under the APPs and only authorised staff may access personal information.
You can help with the security of your personal information by:
ensuring that you do not disclose your Powershop account username and password to anyone;
using a strong password for your Powershop account, and not using the same password anywhere else; and
ensuring you always logout from your Powershop account when you have finished using it, particularly when you access your account from a shared or public computer.
Card security
When you use your credit card on our website or through our mobile application the credit card information will be encrypted during transmission. We store only some of your credit card details, however your full credit card details will be encrypted and securely stored by our online payment provider.
Your rights in relation to your personal information
We aim to keep our information as accurate as possible. You can request:
access to your personal information;
correction or deletion of your personal information (but only where it is no longer required for a legitimate business purpose or we are not required to retain it by law);
that you no longer receive direct marketing communications;
that the processing of your personal information is restricted;
combining of your personal information from different sources to create a personal profile no longer takes place; and/or
that you receive personal information that you have provided to us, in a structured, digital form to be transmitted to another party if this is technically feasible.
To make any of these requests please contact us at info@powershop.com.au or call us on 1800 462 668. If for some reason we cannot grant your request, we will explain why.
Who can you contact if you have a query, concern or complaint about your personal data?
If at any time you feel that we have not complied with this policy or the Australian Privacy Principles, please let us know and we will take reasonable steps to investigate such matters.
You can do this by sending an email to complaints@powershop.com.au or the Shell group email Privacy-Office-SI@shell.com or by writing to us at:
Privacy Officer
Powershop Australia
PO Box 1639
Melbourne VIC 3001
The way in which we deal with complaints is set out on our website at www.powershop.com.au/complaints/. We hope that we will be able to resolve any complaints with you, but if you are not happy with how we resolve your complaint, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at:
Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
GPO Box 5218
Sydney NSW 2001
Telephone: 1300 363 992
Email: enquiries@oaic.gov.au
Website: www.oaic.gov.au
You also have the right to lodge a complaint to the Dutch Data Protection Authority whose address is Prins Clauslaan 60, 2595 AJ The Hague, The Netherlands. Please visit https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/en for more information.
Updates to this policy
We may update this privacy policy at any time by publishing a new version of the privacy policy to our website. We encourage you to periodically visit www.powershop.com.au/privacy-policy/ for the latest information on our privacy practices.
* This Privacy Policy was published in September 2022 and replaces all previous Powershop Privacy Policies.