Privacy statement

Vector Limited and its related entities (Vector, we, our, us) is committed to protecting our customers’ personal information. We have created this Privacy Statement to help you understand how we collect, use and protect your information when you visit our websites and use our products and services.

This Privacy Statement covers the following topics:

• What information does Vector collect?
• How does Vector process information about website use?
• How does Vector use your information?
• When does Vector share your information?
• How does Vector protect your information?
• How can you access or update your information?
• Changes to our Privacy Statement

This Statement is provided for your information and doesn't limit or exclude your rights, or our rights and responsibilities, under the Privacy Act 2020.

1. What information does Vector collect?

We need to collect personal information so we can deliver our services. You do not have to provide personal information to us. However, in some circumstances – such as where you have asked us to assist you with a query or complaint – if you do not provide us with some or all of the information that we ask for, we may not be able to provide products or services to you.

Information we collect directly from you

We collect information about you that you have provided to us. For example, you might provide information to us on a services application or registration form, when you use our products and services, when your details are recorded in a visitor or site log, when you enter a competition or promotion, or when you interact with our field service providers and other contractors.

The information we may collect directly from you includes:

• Name;
• Contact information, including address, phone number and email address;
• Information about your complaint, enquiry or outage report;
• Information about the products or services you request and use;
• Information about your property (for health and safety purposes);
• Information about your interactions with us, including correspondence and call recordings;
• CCTV footage collected at some of our sites; and
• Information about your use of our websites (see section 2).

Information we collect from energy retailers

Energy retailers are required by the Electricity Industry Participation Code 2010 and our distribution agreements with them to share certain information with us. Some of this information may be personal information about you. The personal information we collect from energy retailers includes:

• Customer information – customer names, ICP identifiers, and contact information;
• Medically dependent customer information – identifying medically dependent customers to assist in the event of a planned or unplanned outage; and
• Half hour metering information – detailed information about power consumption at each ICP.

Information we collect from other third parties

We may also collect information about you from other third parties, such as your meter equipment providers, your service providers (including your lawyer, surveyor, property manager, insurer, property developer, electrician, or installer), and any other individuals or organisations who may provide us with your details as a result of their engagement with us.

Where we collect personal information about you from a third party, we will take reasonable steps to make you are aware of this. This may include contacting you directly, or making sure the third party that gave us the information has already told you. In some cases, we may not notify you, such as where it would not be reasonably practicable to do so, or not notifying you would not prejudice your interests.

2. How does Vector process information about website use?

We may use cookies and other interactive techniques such as web beacons to collect information about how you interact with our website, and web-related products and services, to:

• Understand what you like and use on our website;
• Understand what you do not like and do not use on our website;
• Provide a more enjoyable, customised service and experience;
• Enable you to use certain services on our website; and
• Help us develop and deliver better products and services tailored to our customers' interests and needs.

We also collect IP addresses. IP addresses are assigned to computers on the internet to uniquely identify them within the global network. We collect and manage IP addresses in order to provide internet session management and for security purposes.

We may use a persistent cookie to record details such as a unique user identity and general registration details on your PC. This helps us recognise you on subsequent visits to this website so that you don't have to re-enter your registration details each time you visit us and allows us to carry out the activities mentioned above.

Most browsers (such as Internet Explorer, Chrome etc) allow you to choose whether to accept cookies or not – you can either refuse all cookies or you can set your browser to alert you each time that a website tries to set a cookie. You do not need to have cookies turned on to access our sites, but you may need them for customisable areas of the site that we may develop in the future, or to access and benefit from certain functionality offered by the site.

3. How does Vector use your information?

The information that we collect about you may be used by us for a number of purposes connected with our business, including:

• Supplying you with products and services;
• Processing your orders or applications and administering your account;
• Enabling Entrust to liaise with the Entrust beneficiaries to pay annual dividends, organise trustee elections and otherwise contact beneficiaries as required (see https://www.entrustnz.co.nz/privacy-policy);
• Billing you (unless you pay by another agreed method) and collecting any debt owed to us by you;
• Dealing with your requests, enquiries or complaints and other customer care related activities;
• Informing you or updating you about planned or unplanned outages;
• Informing you about special offers or promotions that are relevant to your relationship with us;
• Carrying out any activity in connection with a legal, statutory or regulatory requirement on us or in connection with legal proceedings, crime or fraud prevention, detection or prosecution;
• Carrying out any activity in connection with the network, such as monitoring, operating, outage management, planning, optimisation, and improvement;
• Carrying out any activity in connection with the running of our business, such as personnel training, quality control, product and service improvements, testing and maintenance of computer and other systems and in connection with the transfer of any part of our business in respect of which you are a customer or a potential customer; 
• Meeting our health and safety obligations to customers and staff, including contact tracing in relation to an epidemic; or
• For general administrative and business purposes.

CCTV footage specifically may be used for the following purposes:

• Detecting and deterring criminal behaviour on our sites; and
• Monitoring the safety and security of our staff and our sites, and completing incident investigations.

4. When does Vector share your information?

There may be times when we need to disclose your personal information to third parties. For example, we may disclose your information to:

• Our Group companies who may use and disclose your information for the same purposes as us;
• Those who provide us or our Group companies with products or services that support the services that we provide, such as (but not limited to) our suppliers, field service providers and contractors;
• Credit reporting agencies (unless we have agreed otherwise), who may share your information with other organisations and who may keep a record of the searches we make against your name;
• If someone else pays your bill, such as your landlord, that person;
• Anyone we transfer our business to in respect of which you are a customer or a potential customer;
• Anyone who hosts or maintains data centres, service platforms, cloud-based solutions and other infrastructure and systems on behalf of us and our Group companies, where your information is processed, hosted or stored; or
• Any other person or organisation as permitted by the Privacy Act 2020.

We may also disclose your personal information where this is necessary to:

• Assist with any request from Worksafe, the Ministry of Health or a District Health Board in relation to contact tracing for an epidemic; 
• Protect or enforce our legal rights or interests, or to defend any claims made against us by any person (including you);
• Report a cyber incident or for cyber security purposes (including to prevent unauthorised access to, or attacks on, our systems);
• Prevent or lessen a serious threat to a person's health or safety;
• Assist a law enforcement agency to investigate or prosecute an offence; or
• Comply with the law.

5. How does Vector protect your information

We will take all reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we collect, use or disclose is accurate, complete, up to date and stored in a secure environment protected from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

We retain personal information only for as long as it is needed for a lawful purpose, after which time it is securely deleted. For example, CCTV footage will usually be retained for a period of three months; visitor logs will usually be retained for a period of one year.

We will never ask you for your password in an unsolicited phone call or in an unsolicited email. Also, if you are using the internet, remember to sign out of your account and close your browser window when you have finished. This is to ensure that others cannot access your personal information and correspondence if you share a computer with someone else or are using a computer in a public place.

We make every effort to maintain the security of our internet connections; however for reasons outside of our control, security risks may still arise. Any personal information transmitted to us or from our online products or services will therefore be at your own risk, though we will use our best efforts to ensure that any such information remains secure.

6. How can you access or update your information?

You may request access to the personal information we hold about you by sending an email to privacy@vector.co.nz. Please quote your name and address. We would be grateful if you could also provide brief details of what information you want a copy of (this helps us to more readily locate your data).

In some cases, there may be a charge associated with providing copies of your personal information to you. If so, we will advise you of this prior to sending your information to you.

We will not be able to provide your personal information if we do not know or don't have reasonable grounds to believe it is personal information about you or if disclosing the information would involve the unwarranted disclosure of the affairs of another individual.

You can request correction of the information we hold about you at any time by sending us an email to privacy@vector.co.nz and specifying the information that you believe should be corrected. If it is reasonable in the circumstances for us to do so, we will make the requested correction, otherwise we'll take reasonable steps to mark that information as having been subject to a correction request.

7. Changes to our Privacy Statement

We may change this Privacy Statement from time to time and we will tell you about a change in the Privacy Statement by posting an updated Privacy Statement on our website. Any change we make applies from the date we post it on the website.