Privacy

EWOV is committed to protecting the privacy of consumers who contact us requesting information or wishing to make a complaint. EWOV complies with the requirements of Australian privacy laws, including the Commonwealth Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles.

To help you with your enquiry or complaint, EWOV collects personal information. Generally, personal information is information about an individual which can be used to identify that individual. The Australian Privacy Principles outline how personal information should be managed by organisations to make sure the privacy of individuals who deal with those organisations is protected.

We collect personal information from you when you contact us to lodge an enquiry or complaint about an electricity, gas or water provider. We use the personal information we collect to help us respond to your enquiry or to help us resolve your complaint about your provider. You do not have to give us personal information but if you choose not to, we may be unable to help you.

Where we are investigating your complaint, we also collect information about the complaint from your provider. In some cases, we may need to seek information from agents of your provider, such as the relevant electricity or gas distributor. Where we do so, we will seek your consent.

Depending on the nature of your complaint, we may also need to seek information from other people or organisations. If we require personal information from any other third party to meet our functions or purposes, we will first seek consent from you.

EWOV tries to collect information from the person making a complaint but sometimes we are contacted by someone else on their behalf. In such instances, we can only engage with a representative where the account holder to whom the complaint relates has provided authority for the representative to act on their behalf.

EWOV will use your personal information to respond to your enquiry or resolve your complaint. To do this, we need to disclose your personal information to your provider. We may also need to disclose your personal information to other people who may be able to assist in the investigation, for instance, our external independent advisers or technical experts. Where appropriate, we will seek your express consent to use or disclose your personal information to a third party for the purposes of furthering our investigation and resolution of your complaint.

We report to regulators, the public and other stakeholders about our activities. However, this information is always de-identified. If we do believe it is necessary to provide your personal information to another organisation, or if the organisation requests your personal information following a de-identified report by EWOV, we will always ask you for permission before we give out the information.

EWOV may also pass on your contact details to a market research company for the purpose of talking with you about your satisfaction with EWOV’s processes. Please tell us if you do not wish to be contacted by a market research company.

We collect very limited and generic information about all visitors to our online resources to identify generic behavioural patterns. EWOV uses Google Analytics on its website. EWOV does not use this information to personally identify any visitor.

If you want to have someone act on your behalf, or to have EWOV provide information about your complaint to someone else, you will need to authorise this. If relevant, an authority to act form, signed by the account holder must be provided to us. We also normally need written authority if you are acting on behalf of a business. You can discuss how to provide authority with the staff member handling your complaint.

EWOV will provide you with access to your personal information when you ask us for access, unless one of the exceptions in the Australian Privacy Principles applies. If you want access to the personal information EWOV holds about you, you can make a request to the staff member handling your complaint.

Alternatively, you can send a written request for access to:

The Privacy Manager
EWOV
GPO Box 469
Melbourne 3001
Email: ewovinfo@ewov.com.au

Please be as specific as possible about the information you are seeking to help us in reviewing your request.

If you become aware that there are mistakes in the personal information EWOV holds, please let us know so we can correct the information. Our Privacy Policy has more information about how we fix incorrect information, or what will happen if we do not agree that the information is wrong.