Privacy Policy

Who is responsible for your information

Electron provides and runs ElectronConnect, and is responsible for the personal information held on it.

Northgrid Networks is an Electron customer that uses ElectronConnect to run its flexibility markets. When you take part in its markets, Northgrid Networks also receives information about you and your organisation's activity in them, and handles it under its own privacy policy.

What we collect

• Account details: your work email address, the organisation you work for, your role on the platform and, where you give it, your name.
• Sign-in and security details: when you sign in, that you have set up a second sign-in step with an authenticator app, and failed attempts to sign in. Passwords are checked by our sign-in service and are never stored by us.
• A record of what is done on the platform: who submitted, reviewed or changed offers, assets, dispatch instructions and other records, and when.
• Technical details: the internet address and browser a request came from, and an identifier for each request, kept in server logs to keep the platform secure and to put faults right.

Most information on the platform is about organisations and their assets, offers and electricity data, not about people. We do not ask for sensitive personal information, and you should not enter any.

How we use it, and why we are allowed to

• To provide the platform: to give you an account, let you take part in markets, and send you the emails the platform sends (for example, when offers are accepted). This is needed for the contracts between Electron, its customers and the organisations taking part.
• To keep the platform secure: to check who you are, stop misuse, and investigate problems. This is in our legitimate interest, and in yours.
• To keep records that the electricity industry's rules and the law require. This is a legal obligation.

We do not make decisions about people by automated means alone.

Who we share it with

Your information is seen by Electron's own team where they need it to run and support the platform, by Northgrid Networks for the markets you take part in, and by the people in your own organisation who need it. Other providers never see your personal information.

• Carefully chosen service providers who help us run the platform: hosting and database services, email delivery, error monitoring and virus scanning of uploaded files. Each may use the information only to provide its service to us, under a written contract.
• Regulators, courts or the police, when the law requires it.

We never sell personal information.

Where it is kept

The platform and its database are hosted in the European Economic Area. If a service provider handles information outside the UK or the European Economic Area, we make sure it is protected to the standard UK law requires, for example with the UK's approved contract terms for international transfers.

How long we keep it

We keep your account details while you have an account. We keep the records of what was done on the platform for as long as the industry's rules, the law and the marketplace's contracts require, because they show who did what. After that, information is deleted or made anonymous.

How we protect it

• Everything sent to and from the platform is encrypted.
• Signing in needs a second step from an authenticator app.
• Each network company's marketplace is kept apart from every other's by the database itself, and each person sees only what their organisation and role allow.
• Every change to the records is written to a log that cannot be altered.
• Uploaded files are checked for viruses before they are accepted.

Cookies

We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in and to keep the platform secure. We do not use advertising or tracking cookies, so there is nothing to accept or turn off.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you can ask to see the personal information held about you, have it corrected, deleted or limited, object to how it is used, or receive a copy to take elsewhere. Some records must be kept by law even if you ask for them to be deleted; if so, we will tell you why.

To use any of these rights, or to ask a question about this policy, contact Electron through the Help Centre. For how Northgrid Networks uses information it receives about its markets, see Northgrid Networks's own privacy policy. We will reply within one month.

If you are not happy with how your information has been handled, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

Changes to this policy

We will update this policy when the way we handle information changes, and change the date at the top. If a change is significant, we will tell you on the platform or by email before it takes effect.