Non-Member Privacy Policy

Last Updated: 25th March 2022

  1. Introduction
    1. This privacy policy (the Non-Member Privacy Policy) applies to non-members only, i.e. those that do not hold shares in Edinburgh Community Solar Limited and who are not making an application to become a member through a relevant share offer. If you are a shareholder/member, or are completing an application to become a shareholder/member, your personal data will not be governed by this policy, instead, please see the Member Privacy Policy.
    2. This policy sets out how Edinburgh Community Solar Limited (“ECSC”/”us”/”we”/”our”) uses and protects any information that non-members (“you”) provide when you use this website (edinburghsolar.coop, edinburghsolar.org.uk and any subdomains thereof) and when, if applicable, you contact us by email, phone or post.
    3. Edinburgh Community Solar Co-operative and Edinburgh Community Solar Co-op are trading names of Edinburgh Community Solar Limited. We are a registered limited company with company number IP032277.
    4. We are a Registered Society under the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act 2014 with registration number 32277R.
    5. Our registered address is:
      Edinburgh Community Solar Limited
      Friends of the Earth Scotland
      Thorn House
      5 Rose Street
      Edinburgh
      EH2 2PR
    6. Our business address is:
      Edinburgh Community Solar Co-operative
      Unit 26
      Trinity Enterprise Centre
      Furness Business Park
      Barrow-in-Furness
      LA14 2PN
    7. This website is run in conjunction with Energy4All Limited (“Energy4All”) who manage the day to day affairs of ECSC on our behalf.
    8. For matters relating to this privacy policy and data protection, please contact us by email at info@edinburghsolar.coop or by post to our business address above.
  2. Data We Collect
    We may collect:
    1. Name and title
    2. Job title
    3. Physical and electronic mail addresses
    4. Telephone numbers
    5. Internet Protocol (IP) address
    6. Information automatically presented by your web browser such as browser version, operating system, preferred language, pages viewed, length of visit, referring website/page.
    7. Any other information you explicitly consent to give us (e.g. by sending us an email or submitting the information via an online form)
  3. How We Use Your Data
    1. The information you provide will normally be used to allow us to communicate with you when you contact us and provide an adequate response. This is considered to be a contractual obligation to process your data – i.e. you have asked us something and we need to respond.
    2. If you give us explicit consent, we may use the information we hold about you to send you information relating to the activities of ECSC and/or other organisations that Energy4All works with. Explicit consent will be considered to be provided if you contact us and ask us to process your data in this way or if you submit an online form where it is clear that you are providing consent for your information to be used for this purpose. If we process your data in this way, we will always give you the option to unsubscribe by contacting us using the details in 1.6 and 1.8 and, where the form of contact is email, usually via a link within the email as well.
    3. The information you provide may be checked against a database of ECSC shareholder data to determine whether or not you are a member of the ECSC. If you are deemed to be a member, or through a share offer are requesting to become a member, this policy will not apply and instead your data will be processed in accordance with the Member Privacy Policy.
    4. The information you and your browser provide automatically in your use of this website may be used as follows:
      1. Analysed in our legitimate interests for the purposes of improving this website and ensuring it is not misused. If we find you are misusing this website we may use your information to takes steps against you to prevent such misuse.
      2. Anonymised or pseudo-anonymised and used in aggregate with other website users’ data to help guide the future activities of the ECSC in our legitimate interests.
    5. Should you bring legal proceedings against us or we bring such proceedings against you for any reason, we may process your personal data and/or disclose it to our representatives where necessary, in our legitimate interests.
    6. We may also use your data for any other purpose but only where:
      1. We reasonably believe that it is in your or some other natural person’s vital interests (i.e. to act to safeguard life)
      2. We are required to do so by law.
  4. Information Storage, Sharing and Retention
    1. Your data will be shared with Energy4All who act as a data processor for the ECSC. Your data will be securely stored by Energy4All on our behalf at our business address listed in 1.6 and/or at any suitable substitute address as they determine which provides equal or greater safeguards to your data.
    2. ECSC has an appropriate contract in place with Energy4All to ensure that your data is treated in accordance with this privacy policy and the Data Protection Act 2018, and that appropriate physical, electronic and managerial procedures are in place to safeguard and secure the information they hold about you.
    3. As part of the ECSC and Energy4All’s use of your data, it may be securely transferred to servers in other countries including those outwith the European Economic Area. If this occurs the ECSC and Energy4All will ensure that appropriate safeguards (as determined by the Information Commissioner’s Office or European Commission) are in place to ensure your data is not accessed by unauthorised third parties.
    4. Information collected automatically from your web browser as you view the website will be collected by Google Inc. on our behalf as part of their Google Analytics service. This data will be stored on Google’s servers in accordance with their privacy policy which can be found at policies.google.com/privacy.
    5. Information you provide to us may be retained in a personally identifiable form for a period of one year. This is to allow us to refer back any previous correspondence or interactions with us if you subsequently choose to do so again. After this time, unless we are subject to a legal requirement to retain your data for longer, only anonymised information relating to your browsing activity of this website will be retained.
  5. Your Rights
    1. You have certain rights under the Data Protection Act 2018 such as the right to data access, right to rectify any errors in the data we hold, right to data erasure and right to object to data processing. If you would like to find out more about these and other rights under the Data Protection Act 2018, please see the Information Commissioners website or contact us and we will be happy to help with any enquiry.
    2. To exercise any of your rights under the Data Protection Act 2018, please contact us using the details in 1.6, 1.8 or on our Contact Us page.
    3. The ECSC’s use of your information is regulated by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office. If you feel we have or are failing to act in accordance with your rights and we have been unable to respond to your objection in a satisfactory manner, you have a right to make a complaint by contacting them using the details found on their website which is ico.org.uk.
  6. Other
    1. Please be aware, while ECSC and Energy4All will take all reasonable steps required to safeguard your data as per the Data Protection Act 2018, email is not a secure form of communication (it’s the electronic equivalent of a postcard) and there is a small chance the contents of any emails you send to us or any we send to you could be intercepted and read by someone else. The forms on our website also use email to transmit your data to Energy4All’s servers and so you should not enter anything onto those that you wouldn’t be comfortable with putting in an email. If you not comfortable with your data being transmitted in this way then you can send post to our business address shown in 1.6 or call us. The details for both are on our Contact Us page.
    2. Our website may contain links to other websites which are not under our control. If you choose to follow such a link, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information you disclose to those sites as they are not governed by this or any other ECSC policy. We recommend that you exercise caution by reviewing the relevant privacy policies of the sites in question.
  7. Policy changes
    1. From time to time we may update this policy by updating this page or replacing it with a new policy that can be easily found from our website’s homepage.
    2. You should occasionally check back here for any updates to this policy.
    3. If we believe, in our sole opinion, that any changes to this policy represents a change that is materially disadvantageous to you or significantly different from this current policy, where possible, we may contact you by email to inform you of the changes. Where this is not possible, at our discretion, we may opt to contact you by post instead.

Google ReCAPTCHA

ECSC uses ReCAPTCHA on our website.

ReCAPTCHA is a Google service that collects the personal information of users to protect our site against spam and bots.

ReCAPTCHA works by implementing an algorithm to analyse a user’s activity by taking a screenshot of the user’s browser window. If the activity is deemed as mechanical or a made-up word is used, the activity is flagged by the system.

Activity and user information ReCAPTCHA collects and analyses include the following:

  • Typing patterns of the user
  • The amount of mouse clicks a user has done on the site or touches on an app
  • What language the user’s browser is using
  • Google cookies that have been placed on the site
  • The answers to question fields on the site
  • CSS information
  • Plug-ins installed on the browser

The algorithm also recognises IP addresses that have been previously recognised as humans through cookies.

To learn more about what information Google collects please visit their Privacy Policy page here.