Welcome
As a communications provider, using personal information is fundamental to what we do – from connecting calls to developing and promoting our services. We believe that it is very important that our customers trust us with their personal information.
This privacy notice explains what personal information we collect about you and how we use it during our relationship with you. You can also find details of what rights you have (including the right to object to some of the data handling we carry out), as well as how to exercise those rights in the Your Rights section below.
Technology is a fast-changing area and can be complicated. We’ve included a Glossary which explains the meaning of any technical terms we use.
Where we use the words “We” or “Our” we mean either Plusnet plc or British Telcommunications plc – both part of the BT Group.
This privacy notice explains how we use the personal information collected from or about you when you are one of our customers or when you contact us or use our services.
The company that is responsible for your personal information will be the company that is named in any terms and conditions or messages sent to you.
We will also share your personal information with other companies in the BT Group. You can find out more details about this in the Sharing Your Information section below.
This notice applies to the products and services we provide you (such as phone and broadband) and our websites and where we pass your details on to insurance or finance providers as part of your payment for our products or services.
It also applies even if you’re not one of our customers, but you interact with us as part of us running our business, for example by:
- Using one of our products or services – paid for by someone else
- acting with authorisation on behalf of one of our customers
- taking part in a survey or trial
- entering a prize promotion
- calling our helpdesk
- generally enquiring about our services
If you need to give us personal information about someone else in relation to our products and services, this privacy notice will also apply to their information. If we need the permission of the other person to use that information, we’ll ask you to check they are OK with this.
We have separate privacy notices in the BT Group that apply if you buy products or services directly with other companies in the group or if you are a business customer (which applies if you are a sole trader, partnership, or company). You can find links to our other BT Group Privacy Notices below:
This notice doesn’t cover other third-party companies or organisations collecting and using your personal information to provide you with products and services, including those who use cookies, tags and other technologies to offer relevant online advertisements to you. You can find more details about how those third parties use your data by visiting their privacy notices on their own websites. You should review their privacy notices before giving them your information.
You can ask us to provide you with a copy of your personal data at any time. If you have given us your personal information because you have a contract with us or because you have consented to us handling it, you are entitled to ask us for a copy of this information in a structured, commonly used and machine readable format so that you can reuse it or share it with other organisations.
In some circumstances (including where we rely on ‘legitimate interests’), you have the right to object to our processing of your data and can ask us to restrict our use of your data and to delete it. You also have the right to ask us to correct your information if it’s inaccurate and, as described below, to object to automated decision making.
We aim to provide our products and services in a way that protects information and respects your request. Because of this, when you delete or change (or ask us to delete or change) your information from our systems, we might not do so straight away from our back-up systems or copies on our active servers. And we may need to keep some information to fulfil your request (for example, keeping your email address to make sure it’s not on our marketing list).
Where we can, we’ll confirm any changes. For example, we’ll check a change of address against the Postal Address File, or we might ask you to confirm it.
There are some exceptions to these rights, for example we might not be able to delete your data if we need it to fulfil your contract or we are required to keep it by law. We also might not be able to provide you with information if it would infringe someone else’s rights. We’ll always try to help you with your request and if we believe we are unable to fulfil your request we will always explain why.
Where you have given consent for us to handle your personal information or permission to provide a service, you can change your mind and withdraw this consent at any time. It only applies to how we use your personal information in the future, not what we’ve done in the past.
How do I make a request?
You can exercise any of your rights by using this online form.
Once we’ve looked at your request, we’ll let you know when you can expect to hear from us. It will normally take us up to one month to complete your request, but it could take longer (up to a further two months) if it’s a complicated request or you send us a lot of requests at once.
Want your bill information?
If you want a copy of your billing information, the quickest way to access this information is by logging into your Plusnet account or alternatively, you can call us at 0330 1239 123.
If you would like to request any other personal information you can do this by using this online form.
Want to change your cookies, marketing or consent preferences?
If you want us to stop using personal information we’ve collected via cookies on our website, you can change your cookie settings by visiting our Cookie Policy.
You can opt out of receiving marketing from us at any time using the link provided in any email or text marketing that we send you.
If you're a customer, you can review and change your marketing preferences at any time by logging into Member Centre. Alternatively, you can contact us to tell us that you want to stop hearing from us by using this form or by calling us on 0330 1239 123.
For more information about how we use your information for marketing purposes, please see below.
Children
We only enter into contracts with customers who are over the age of 18. Although the account holder will always be an adult, we recognise that some of our products and services will be used by children. We have developed safety features and provide educational material to help keep your child safe online. You can find more information about these safety features and some guidance to help you stay safe online here.
The personal information we collect, store and use will depend on the products and services you have with us and how you use them. In most cases we have this information because we collect it directly from you, or because it has been derived from your use of our products and services. In some circumstances we will obtain this information from a third party.
Some of the personal information we collect, store and use is considered more sensitive (for example data about health). We will only collect, store and use this more sensitive information to support you and your use of our products and services, and only where we put additional measures in place to protect this personal information.
Below you can find details of how and why we use your information and our permitted reason in law (known as ‘legal basis’) to use it. For some products and services, we handle additional information. You can find specific details by looking at the section for the product or service you’ve bought and see an overview in the ways in which we collect and use your personal information during our relationship.
When you create and use your account
When you create an account, we will collect details about you so we can identify you and contact you about your account.
| How we use your personal information | What personal information we use | Our legal basis for using your personal information |
Further details |
|---|---|---|---|
To set up your account |
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Legitimate interests (to keep business records and prevent fraud) | We do not store the original copy of your password. Instead, we keep it in a form that allows to us authenticate you but does not allow us to work out what your original password is. |
| To send you service messages (confirming your order and telling you about any changes that might affect your service, like when we have infrastructure work planned or we need to fix something) |
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Contract | If you don’t give us the correct information, we might not be able to provide you with the product or service you ordered from us. |
| To arrange the delivery of your products with our courier and update you on when we’ll deliver, connect, or install your products and services |
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Contract | If you don’t give us the correct information, we might not be able to provide you with the product or service you ordered from us. |
| To filter any content you ask us to, throughout parental control settings |
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Legitimate interests (to protect our users and our network) | If you don’t give us the correct information, we might not be able to provide you with the product or service you ordered from us. |
To deal with customer service and complaints including:
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Legitimate interests (to run our business) Contract (where the issue relates to our contractual obligations) |
If you don’t give us the correct information, we might not be able to provide you with the product or service you ordered from us. |
| To charge you and make sure your payment reaches us |
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Contract | If you don’t give us the correct information, we might not be able to provide you with the product or service you ordered from us. |
| To manage overdue payments and recover money you owe us including instructing debt-recovering agencies to collect debts on our behalf (or put in place re-payment plans) |
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Legitimate interests (to recover debt) Where we share the details about your additional needs, we do this on the basis of substantial public interests |
We will only share additional needs information is required to tailor the method in which a third-party would need to contact you. |
To send you marketing and to identify products and services that interest you
We want to make sure that our customers and potential customers know about the great products and services that we offer and that you receive the best offers available, which are tailored and personalised by using the information we know about you.
| How we use your personal information | What personal information we use | Our legal basis for using your personal information |
Further details |
|---|---|---|---|
To send you marketing messages |
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Legitimate Interests (to keep you up to date with our products and services, making them relevant to you) Consent |
When you first buy a product or service from us, you can tell us how you’d like to hear from us. We will always give you the right to opt out of marketing at any time and we will remind you of this in any emails or texts we send. See “Your Rights” for more information. |
| To contact you in relation to a prize draw, competition, or other promotion |
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Consent Legitimate Interests |
We use your information to enter you into the prize draw, competition or promotion and to notify you if you have won. If the promotion terms require it, we will ask for date of birth and details to verify your identity. We will also anonymise the information in order to create analytics around the success of the prize draw or competition. |
| To create a profile about you to better understand you as our customer. We use your profile to identify the products and services that might interest you, to recommend better ways to manage what you spend with us, to improve your experience when engaging with us and to show you more relevant online advertising (both on our and other parties’ apps and sites) and work with other well-known brands to make theirs more suitable too |
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Legitimate interests (to personalise your experiences with us, make our offers relevant to you and help you manage your spend with us) | |
| To show you and others more relevant digital advertising (on both our and other parties’ apps and sites) and work with other well-known brands to make theirs more suitable too, and to measure the performance of our digital advertising campaigns, so that we can make improvements and find others who may be interested in our products and services. |
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Legitimate interests (to manage and improve our services, in promoting our brand) | We use the advertising tools of online platforms to advertise our products (e.g. Facebook custom audiences). For that purpose, we may provide your email address and phone number to the online platform in hashed form for them to present sponsored adverts. When we use the advertising tools of these online platforms, we are both responsible for your information and sometimes act jointly in making decisions about your data while using these tools. You can ask these companies directly about their use of your data. See their privacy notices for more details. |
To run surveys and market research about our products and/or receive feedback on our services/products |
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Legitimate interests to manage and improve our business |
Additional help or support
We understand that some customers may need additional help and support from us. We want to ensure that we are here for you and so have in place processes to support those customers who may have additional needs.
Where you have told us that you have additional needs when you purchase a product or service from us, through your interactions with us or during our relationship with you (for example if you tell an advisor of your change of circumstances), or if a family member, or carer provides this information on your behalf, we record this to tailor our services to those needs.
You can find more information about what we mean by additional needs and on how we support these customers here.
| How we use your personal information | What personal information we use | Our legal basis for using your personal information |
Further details |
|---|---|---|---|
To help with managing your account and ensuring we use the best means to communicate with you |
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| To ensure we provide you with products and services that are appropriate to your needs |
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| To allow a third party to manage your account on your behalf |
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| Where applicable we will share your information with debt-recovery agencies |
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To make sure they can communicate with you in the most appropriate way |
Linked accounts:
If you tell us you’re associated with someone else financially (for example, by marriage or civil partnership), we’ll link your records together. You must make sure you have their agreement to share information about them. The agencies we share the information with also link your records together and these links will stay on your and their files – unless you or your partner successfully asks the agency to break that link.
To protect our business, our customers, and the public
| How we use your personal information | What personal information we use | Our legal basis for using your personal information |
Further information |
|---|---|---|---|
To prevent and detect criminal activity on our network or against your equipment To monitor traffic over our network To track Malware and cyber-attacks |
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Legitimate interests in protecting our network and business from attacks and to prevent and detect crime and fraud. We may also share it with other organisations (such as other communications providers and banks) who have the same legitimate interests. |
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| To help detect and stop crime, prosecute offenders, and protect national security |
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Legal obligation |
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| To make and defend claims |
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Legitimate interest |
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| To route communications through parts of our network, equipment and systems |
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Legal obligation |
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To develop our business and services and to create aggregated and anonymised information for further use
We use your information to maintain, develop and test our products and services although we’ll always try to use anonymised information for this purpose.
| How we use your personal information | What personal information we use | Our legal basis for using your personal information |
Further details |
|---|---|---|---|
To train our people and suppliers to provide you with products and services and to continuously improve our customer services (but we make the information anonymous beforehand wherever possible) |
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We will share this information with the BT Group for reporting and administrative purposes. |
To ensure our network is working properly and to continuously improve and develop our network, products and services for our customers To run management and corporate reporting, research and analytics to improve our business |
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We will typically anonymise and aggregate this information to carry out these uses. If we’re trying to fix a fault that you’ve reported, we may need to use identifiable data to help identify the specific problem. |
| To provide other organisations with aggregated and anonymous reports |
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We collect data about how our networks are used and about our customers. We then aggregate and anonymise this data so no individual can be identified and to provide statistical reports to other organisations to use for planning purposes (for example to show internet bandwidth usage in different areas). |
Broadband
We use your information to provide you with the Plusnet broadband service.
| How we use your personal information | What personal information we use | Our legal basis for using your personal information |
Further details |
|---|---|---|---|
In order to deliver the connection and manage the network |
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We will share this information with the BT Group for reporting and administrative purposes. |
To run our coverage checker |
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Phone
We use your information to provide you with the Plusnet broadband service.
| How we use your personal information | What personal information we use | Our legal basis for using your personal information |
Further details |
|---|---|---|---|
In order to deliver the connection and manage the network |
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We will share this information with the BT Group for reporting and administrative purposes. |
In order to deliver the connection and manage the network |
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We are required by Ofcom to hold a directory of the numbers we have issued. When you purchase a landline service, we will ask you whether you want to be in our public phone book. If you are in our phone book, we’ll publish your details and share that information with other providers of directory services. Ex-directory numbers are not shown in the public phone book. You can ask to be removed from the public phone book at any time If you ask to be removed, we will remove you from any future issues of the phone book but are unable to remove you from historic published issue. |
Who do we share your personal information with, why and how?
We share your personal information with other companies within the BT Group for administrative purposes. We have a group-wide arrangement, known as binding corporate rules, to make sure your personal information is protected, no matter which company in the BT Group holds that information.
We share your personal information with other organisations for the following reasons:
- With our insurance providers, for example if there is a claim made against us
- With collection companies to collect debts
- With third parties whose products and services we market to you (where you have given consent to receive such messages)
- With local authorities and alarm providers to identify vulnerable customers affected by the All-IP Programme and the switch to Digital Voice
- With other communications companies (for example where you switch provider)
- With other organisations, such as spam detection or operating system providers, for the purposes of fraud prevention
We may also share your information:
- With any public authority or law enforcement agency (if they ask for it)
- To comply with law or regulations, or for possible legal proceedings
- If there’s a change in who owns us or any of our assets, we might share personal information to the new (or prospective) owner and our advisors.
When we share your information with other organisations we’ll make sure it’s protected, as far as is reasonably possible.
Using third party service providers
We use other providers to carry out services on our behalf or to help us provide services to you.
We also use them to:
- provide customer-service, marketing, infrastructure and information-technology services;
- personalise our service and make it work better;
- process payment transactions;
- analyse and improve the information we hold (including about your interactions with our service);
- assist with fraud prevention and detection; and
- run surveys
The countries we share personal information to
We share your personal information with other companies within the BT Group. We have a group-wide arrangement, known as binding corporate rules, to make sure your personal information is protected, no matter which company in the BT Group holds that information.
We also share your personal information with other companies – such as your bank - so they can protect you against fraud and maintain accurate records.
We also use other service providers to process personal information on our behalf. Details of how they handle your personal information are set out below.
How do we protect your personal information?
We have strict security measures to protect your personal information. We check your identity when you get in touch with us, and we follow our security procedures and apply suitable technical measures, such as encryption, to protect your information.
How long do we keep your personal information?
We’ll keep details about your account and the products and services you’ve bought and paid for while you’re a customer. In particular we’ll keep the following:
| Data type | How long we keep it |
|---|---|
| Your general account details, including information contained in your customer profile, contact details and purchase history | 6 years from the date on which your account is closed |
| A summary copy of your bills | 6 years from the date of the bill / 15 months |
| Customer service records, including calls to our call centres and online chats | Up to 6 years from the date of the interaction, depending on the purpose of the interaction |
| Data relating to calls | Up to 12 months after the call |
| Financial and payment information | Up to 6 years from the date of creation |
| Marketing preferences, including contact details | 2 years from when your account last had an active Plusnet service |
| Details relating to any dispute | 6 years from the date on which the case was closed |
In other cases we’ll store personal information for the periods needed for the reason we collected it or need to use it. And sometimes we’ll keep it for longer if we need to, for example if we're required to retain data to comply with our legal obligations such as our obligations to HMRC, or if we need to retain it for the purpose of dealing with legal claims. Otherwise, we delete it. You can ask us for specific information on retention periods using the details below.
If you are unhappy about how we have handled your personal information you can make a complaint to our data protection officer here who will investigate the matter and report back to you.
If you are still not satisfied after our response or believe we are not using your personal information in line with the law, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner, the regulator in the UK. You can find details of how to contact them on their website at https://ico.org.uk/.
If you'd like any more details, or you have comments or questions about our privacy policy, contact us using this form or write to us at:
FAO: The Data Protection Officer
Data Privacy Team
Pp Floor 16
1 Braham Street
London E1 8EE
We have included a description of how the technical terms we use are generally interpreted.
- Account Holder means the individual(s) we have entered into an agreement for the product or service with.
- Aggregated data means grouped information, for example the total number of calls made in a month or total number of minutes called.
- Anonymised data means data which has had all personally identifiable information removed.
- BT, we or our means British Telecommunications Plc.
- Binding corporate rules are designed to allow multinational companies to transfer personal information from the European Economic Area (EEA) to their affiliates outside of the EEA and to keep to data-protection legislation.
- Browser records means the types of websites that you visit, as well as the date, time, length of your internet session, cell site and network used, device information, your data usage, your IP address, and the nature of the websites you view.
- Call records means the date, time, length and cost of your communications, device information, the location the call was made to and from, the network used and the type of communication, including when you make calls abroad.
- Cell site means the place where we keep the antennae and communications equipment we use to create a cellular network over which we transmit communications.
- Content means any part of a communication which shares the meaning of the communication. This could be the title of an email or video.
- Cookies are small text files created by a website and stored in the user's connected device – either temporarily for that session only or permanently on the hard disk (called a persistent cookie).
- Data usage means the volume of data you’ve used or what’s included under your service agreement with us. This can be a download or upload volume.
- Device information means the MAC address, MSISDN, IMEI, IMSI and advertising identifiers for your device. Device information also means the hardware manufacturer, model and operating system version for the device.
- Encryption means scrambling information into an unreadable form that can only be translated back using a special key.
- IP address is a unique string of numbers that identifies each device using the internet or a local network.
- MAC address (media access control address) is a unique identifier assigned to a network connection made to a device.
- Personal information means information that identifies you as an individual, or is capable of doing so.
- Postal Address File means the Royal Mail address database, containing over 30 million UK postal addresses.
- Plusnet, we and our means Plusnet Plc.
- Power of attorney refers to the option to choose a trusted friend or relative (or more than one if you want) to act on your behalf. The person you appoint, called an 'attorney', can then use your money to pay bills, sell assets on your behalf and make gifts. In the UK an ‘attorney’ must be registered with the Office of the Public Guardian to be valid.
- Regulatory obligations are our obligations to regulators such as Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office.
- Tags are an instruction inserted on a website that specifies how the site, or a part of the site, should be formatted and how it’s performing.
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