Privacy Policy

Milton Keynes Community Energy is committed to respecting the privacy of your personal information and will never sell your data to third parties. This Website Privacy Notice explains our policy for dealing with personal information that we collect through our website; https://mkce.onyx-sites.io

By providing us with your data, you warrant to us that you are over 13 years of age.

We have appointed a Data Protection Officer who is in charge of privacy related matters for us. If you have any questions about this privacy notice, please contact the Data Protection Officer using the details set out below.

WHAT DATA DO WE COLLECT, FOR WHAT PURPOSE AND ON WHAT GROUND WE PROCESS IT

Personal data means any information capable of identifying an individual. It does not include anonymised data. We may process the following categories of personal data:

Communication Data:  includes any communication sent to us whether that be through the contact form on our website, through email, text, social media messaging, social media posting or any other communication that you send us.

  • Purpose: To communicate with you, maintain records, and establish or defend legal claims.
  • Lawful Ground: Legitimate interests—to respond to communications, maintain records, and protect our legal interests.

School Enquiry Data: Includes data provided by schools responding to the “1 MW of Solar for MK Schools” campaign, such as school contact details, submitted forms, and energy usage data.

  • Purpose: To generate a proposal for solar energy opportunities and facilitate Solar Education Events in partnership with Solar for Schools.
  • Lawful Ground: Consent, provided through the enquiry process.

Note: Data provided as part of this campaign may be shared with our partner, Solar for Schools, solely for the purpose of generating detailed proposals, facilitating Solar Education Events, and providing follow-up support. We ensure that Solar for Schools processes this data in compliance with data protection regulations and does not use it for any unrelated purposes.

WhatsApp Community Group Data

As part of our commitment to community engagement around home energy and sustainability, we operate a WhatsApp Community titled “MK Community Energy”, which includes interest-based groups such as Home Energy MK and Solar for MK Schools. These groups provide a space for residents of Milton Keynes to connect, share experiences, and support one another on their energy improvement journeys.

We may process the following categories of personal data in relation to participation in these groups:

WhatsApp Group Participation Data: Includes your name and mobile phone number when you provide them to us in order to join a WhatsApp group.

  • Purpose: To invite you to a group, manage your membership, send relevant updates, and support group engagement.
  • Lawful Ground: Consent, provided through the enquiry process.

WhatsApp Community Group Data: Includes your name and mobile phone number when you provide them to us in order to join a WhatsApp group.

  • Purpose: To invite you to a group, manage your membership, send relevant updates, and support group engagement.
  • Lawful Ground: Consent—this data is collected and used only with your explicit permission.

Your contact details will be stored securely and will not be shared outside of the MK Community Energy team. You may request to be removed from any group at any time by contacting us at [email protected], or you may leave the group directly within WhatsApp.

Please be aware that, due to the nature of WhatsApp’s platform, your name and mobile number will be visible to other group members. We do not monitor, collect, or store the content of messages shared in the groups, and we do not use this data for marketing purposes unless you separately opt into such communications.

While MK Community Energy creates and lightly moderates these WhatsApp groups, they are ultimately community-led spaces, and we are not responsible for the content shared by participants. All members are expected to adhere to a shared code of conduct and engage respectfully.

Messages shared within WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted and governed by WhatsApp’s own privacy practices. You can view WhatsApp’s privacy policy at:

https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy

Customer Data: includes data relating to any purchases of goods and/or services such as your name, title, billing address, delivery address email address, phone number, contact details, purchase details and your card details.

  • Purpose: To provide goods and services and maintain transaction records.
  • Lawful Ground: Performance of a contract.

User Data: includes data about how you use our website and any online services together with any data that you post for publication on our website or through other online services.

  • Purpose: To  operate our website and ensure relevant content is provided to you, to ensure the security of our website, to maintain back- ups of our website and/or databases and to enable publication and administration of our website,  online services and business.
  • Lawful Ground: Legitimate interests—to maintain and improve our website and online services.

Technical Data: includes data about your use of our website and online services such as your IP address, your login data, details about your browser, length of visit to pages on our website, page views and navigation paths, details about the number of times you use our website, time zone settings and other technology on the devices you use to access our website. The source of this data is from our analytics tracking system.

  • Purpose: To analyse your use of our website and other online services, to administer and protect our business and website, to deliver relevant website content and advertisements to you and to understand the effectiveness of our advertising.

Lawful Ground: Legitimate interests—to enable us to properly administer our website and grow our business. Marketing Data: includes preferences in receiving marketing materials.

  • Purpose: To deliver relevant content and advertisements to you and measure or understand the effectiveness of this.
  • Lawful Ground: Consent or legitimate interests—based on user interaction and consent to receive updates to develop our products and services and to grow our business.

We may use Customer Data, User Data, Technical Data and Marketing Data to deliver relevant website content and advertisements to you (including Facebook adverts or other display advertisements) and to measure or understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve you. Our lawful ground for this processing is legitimate interests, namely to grow our business. We may also use such data to send other marketing communications to you. Our lawful ground for this processing is either consent or legitimate interests (namely to grow our business).

Sensitive Data We do not collect any Sensitive Data about you. Sensitive data refers to data that includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data. We do not collect any information about criminal convictions and offences.

Where we are required to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of the contract between us and you do not provide us with that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract (for example, to deliver goods or services to you). If you don’t provide us with the requested data, we may have to cancel a product or service you have ordered but if we do, we will notify you at the time.

We will only use your personal data for a purpose it was collected for or a reasonably compatible purpose if necessary. For more information, email us at: [email protected]. In case we need to use your details for an unrelated new purpose we will let you know and explain the legal grounds for processing.

We may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent where this is required or permitted by law.

We do not carry out automated decision making or any type of automated profiling.

HOW WE COLLECT YOUR PERSONAL DATA

We collect personal data through:

  1. Direct Interactions: Via forms, emails, and other communications.
  2. Automated Technologies: Website usage data collected through cookies and tracking tools.

Data provided for the “1 MW of Solar for MK Schools” campaign is collected via our website enquiry form and subsequent communications.

We may collect data about you by you providing the data directly to us (for example by filling in forms on our site or by sending us emails). We may automatically collect certain data from you as you use our website by using cookies and similar technologies. Please see our cookie policy for more details about this.

We may receive data from third parties such as analytics providers such as Google based outside the EU, advertising networks such as Facebook based outside the EU, such as search information providers such as Google based outside the EU, providers of technical, payment and delivery services, such as data brokers or aggregators.

MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Our lawful ground of processing your personal data to send you marketing communications is either your consent or our legitimate interests (namely to grow our business).

As part of the “1 MW of Solar for MK Schools” campaign, schools that submit enquiries will be added to MKCE’s mailing list to receive updates about the campaign, including new school sign-ups, project progress, and related opportunities.

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, we may send you marketing communications from us if (i) you made a purchase or asked for information from us about our goods or services or (ii) you agreed to receive marketing communications and in each case you have not opted out of receiving such communications since. Under these regulations, if you are a limited company, we may send you marketing emails without your consent. However you can still opt out of receiving marketing emails from us at any time.

Before we share your personal data with any third party for their own marketing purposes we will get your express consent. You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you marketing messages at any time by following the opt-out links on any marketing message sent to you or by emailing us at [email protected]

If you opt out of receiving marketing communications this opt-out does not apply to personal data provided as a result of other transactions, such as purchases, warranty registrations etc.

DISCLOSURES OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA

We may share personal data with the following parties:

  • Solar for Schools: Data from school respondents will be shared solely to generate detailed proposals and facilitate Solar Education events. Solar for Schools will process this data under strict compliance with our instructions and data protection regulations.
  • Service Providers: IT and system administration support.
  • Professional Advisers: Including legal and financial consultants.
  • Government Bodies: When required for compliance or legal purposes.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law.

DATA SECURITY

We have put in place security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used, altered, disclosed, or accessed without authorisation. We also allow access to your personal data only to those employees and partners who have a business need to know such data. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they must keep it confidential.

We have procedures in place to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach if we are legally required to.

DATA RETENTION

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

When deciding what the correct time is to keep the data for we look at its amount, nature and sensitivity, potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure, the processing purposes, if these can be achieved by other means and legal requirements.

For tax purposes the law requires us to keep basic information about our customers (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for six years after they stop being customers.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data for research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS

Under data protection laws you have rights in relation to your personal data that include the right to request access, correction, erasure, restriction, transfer, to object to processing, to portability of data and (where the lawful ground of processing is consent) to withdraw consent.

You can read more about these rights here.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please email us at [email protected].

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive or refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you.

If you are not happy with any aspect of how we collect and use your data, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We should be grateful if you would contact us first if you do have a complaint so that we can try to resolve it for you.

THIRD PARTY LINKS

This website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.

COOKIES

You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this website may become inaccessible or not function properly.

CONTACT DETAILS

If you have any questions or feedback about privacy, or wish to make a complaint about the way in which we have handled your personal information, contact us at [email protected].