Orion is committed to protecting your privacy. To provide our customers with an electricity service, we often need to collect personal information. Personal information is any information about an individual that allows an individual to be identified.
We respect your right to privacy, and will work to ensure that the personal information we collect about you is not collected or used unless it is necessary for us to provide our service, and is protected once we have it.
This Privacy Statement sets out what personal information we may collect about you, and how we may store, use and share it, in accordance with relevant laws, including the Privacy Act 1993 up to 30 November 2020 and the Privacy Act 2020 from 1 December 2020 (in each case, the Act).
As someone who deals with us and provides us with personal information, you agree to be bound by this Privacy Statement.
In order to provide our services, we may need to collect personal information about you. This can include:
We may store the above information for possible future communications relevant to the purpose of collection.
We may also assign you or the address where you require our service a unique identifier, such as a retailer customer number or installation control point (ICP) number.
We will generally collect personal information from you directly, including:
To provide you with the service you need, we may also collect additional personal information from third parties where you have authorised this, this is permitted by law, or where the information is publically available. This may include information from:
If you have provided us with personal information about another person, you must have that person’s permission to do so. As part of this you need to comply with your obligations under the Act. For example, you may need to tell that other person that you have done so, that they have a right to access their information and that we will handle their personal information in accordance with this Privacy Statement.
If you are at all concerned about us collecting your personal information, you can ask us or your electricity retailer if it may be possible to opt out of providing it. While some information is essential to provide you with a service, we will let you know what information might not be essential, and if there would be any impact on the level of service we provide to you if you do choose to opt out.
We will only use your personal information for purposes connected with our business, including to:
We may also use your personal information for other purposes for which you have given permission or which is allowed or required by law.
We may use CCTV footage, if required, for detecting and deterring inappropriate or criminal behaviour at our premises, and monitoring the safety and security of our staff, visitors and property.
We may use your personal information to analyse trends, see patterns in our customers’ use of our network and for statistical purposes such as demographics to help us improve our customer service, manage our network capability and meet our legal obligations. Wherever practical, your information used in this way will be aggregated with that of other customers, so you are not personally identified.
To help us with any of the purposes we have set out in this Privacy Statement, we may provide your personal information to:
We take reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is not used by third parties for any other purpose.
We may from time to time transfer personal information to third parties outlined above who are located outside New Zealand. If we do so, we will ensure your personal information will be protected by comparable safeguards to those in New Zealand law. If your personal information will not be protected by comparable safeguards to those in New Zealand law, we will tell you that this is the case, and only transfer your personal information with your consent.
We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we collect, use or disclose is accurate, complete and up-to-date.
We may store your personal information on computer databases and/or in hard copy. We take reasonable steps to ensure your personal information is stored securely and protected from unauthorised access, modification or disclosure and misuse or loss. This includes storing electronic data on servers located in secure premises, firewall and antivirus protection, data encryption and secure passwords and login process.However, due to the nature of email and the internet, we cannot guarantee your personal information will be completely free from access by an unauthorised person (e.g. a hacker). However, we use reasonable safeguards to minimise the risk of this occurring.
We may store your personal information using a third party service provider (including providers outside New Zealand).
If a privacy breach occurs which has caused or may cause serious harm to you, we will notify you of this as soon as practicable either directly or, if that is not reasonably practicable, by public notice.
Aside from some circumstances set out in the Act, you have right to access and correct personal information that we hold about you. To do so, please contact us using the contact details set out in section 12 below. We may require you to contact your electricity retailer if we received the incorrect personal information from them, in order to achieve a permanent correction.
In some cases, there may be a charge associated with providing copies of your personal information to you. If so, we will let you know before sending your information to you.
Some information we hold is necessary to supply you with a service. Wherever practical, we will remove you from our database if requested.
We take all reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is securely destroyed or deleted, once it is no longer needed for the purposes we collected it. We may be required by law to retain certain personal information.
This Privacy Statement only relates to our website and services. Our site may contain links to other third party sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of other websites. You should check their privacy polices before providing personal information to them or any other third party.
We may amend this Privacy Statement at any time. Any amended Privacy Statement will be posted on our website and will be effective from the date that it is posted.
You can call us on 0800 363 9898 or email us at info@oriongroup.co.nz to:
For further privacy information, please refer to the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner’s website – www.privacy.org.nz/.
Updated November 2020.