Our privacy policy and your data
 

There are a few ways we collect your information. This could be when you:

o   Order our products or services (whether via this website, over the phone, in one of our stores or with our field agents)

o   Create and log in to your My Virgin Media account on our website

o   Use our products or services e.g. TiVo and TV apps; mobile

o   Contact us by telephone, email, electronic messaging (such as SMS, MMS or live chat tools) or post

o   Visit this website, including service availability checks in your area or using the “Cable my street” tool

o   When someone refers you for our products and services

o   We also collect information about you from third parties. An example of this could be from members of your household, from content providers and/or delivery service providers

We’ll never keep more information from you than we need to. The types of information we collect will depend upon: (i) whether we collect the information from you or from someone else; and (ii) how / when we collect that information.

Information you give to us:

• When you apply for and/or purchase our products or services, create an online account, or contact us with queries we’ll ask you to give us, where necessary, your generic details (i.e. name, surname, date of birth), your contact details (i.e. address, email, phone number), your financial details (i.e. bank account, payment method, credit card number)
• When you talk to us on the phone, email, communicate via electronic messaging (such as SMS, MMS or live chat tools), write to us or visit us in our retail stores
• In customer surveys from time to time, to help us provide you with improved products and services, we might ask you to fill in a questionnaire, just so you can let us know how we're doing. When sending you a questionnaire we’ll ask you to provide us with the following information: name, account number, email address, telephone number

Information we collect from you when you use our products and services:

• When you visit this website, we’ll use cookies (which are stored on your device(s) – your laptop, mobile phone, tablet etc.) to collect information about your use of our online services (/ website and My Virgin Media account). See our Cookies Policy for more details.
• When you use Virgin Media services (such as our Broadband, TV, home phone lines, mobile phone lines, Virgin Red, Virgin Store, apps such as Virgin TV Go and Virgin TV Control and other apps such as Netflix), we collect information about your use of those services including the following:

o   Call data (i.e. your telephone number, inbound / outbound caller number, time and duration of the call, your device details)

o   Usage data (i.e. frequency, time, location and duration of service usage, data traffic (internet / minutes / SMS) used per month)

o   Billing data (your financial details, bills and its components), which may be used to validate your state of residence is the UK, for the purposes of providing you with access to UK-only online content while you are temporarily visiting another EU member state

o   Payment and transaction data

o   Your television viewing data (shows and ads you’ve watched through video on demand, use of Virgin Media services, technical data such as time and duration of watched content, information on the content recorded/watched, MAC/IP address, the quality of the connection, the model and service number of your set top box)

Audio files if you use the voice search functionality on your Virgin TV Go application, so we can tune and improve speech recognition for your application will learn to understand you.

o   Interactive data (apps usage data, websites usage / visits data)

o   Device Data (IP address, device make and manufacturer, browser information and other similar identifying information required from your devices to communicate with websites and applications on the internet)

We may also monitor, record, store and use the communications we have directly with you to improve the quality of our customer service and/or for training, operational and compliance purposes

Information collected from others:

We may supplement the information that we collect from you and about your use of the services as described above, with information that we receive from third parties.

This may include:

o   Data we collect from other members of your household

o   Data we receive when someone refers you for our products and services

o   Data from other organisations who have obtained your permission to share information about you with us

o   Information we get from reporting agencies, such as credit reference agencies. They give us information about your financial history so we can assess creditworthiness and product suitability, check your identity, manage your account, trace and recover debts and prevent criminal activity. We’ll continue to exchange information about you with credit reference agencies on an ongoing basis, including about your settled accounts and any debts not fully repaid on time.  Credit reference agencies will share your information with other organisations.  Your data will also be linked to the data of your spouse, any joint applicants or other financial associates. The identities of the Credit Reference Agencies and the way they operate are explained in more detail via  https://www.equifax.co.uk/crain

Here are a few places third party data comes from:

• Companies or individuals that introduce you to us
• Credit Reference Agencies
• Fraud Prevention Agencies
• Market Researchers
• Public Information sources such as the electoral roll.

We may use personal information on UK households from third parties that collate and analyse information from public registers and statistical social-economic data. We process this information based on a legitimate interest to enable us to gain local area insights and to review and increase the number of areas in which we can provide our services.

To be removed from CACI’s general register visit https://www.caci.co.uk/content/consumer-information#data-we-hold 

There are a few ways we use the information we hold about you. We’ll use it:

Where it’s necessary to perform our contract with you

o   To determine your eligibility for our products and services / whether they’re available in your area

o   To process your orders for our products and services and to bill you for the same

o   To provide you with the products and services you have ordered from us

o   To provide access to privileged areas of our online services (MyVM account)

o   To respond to any questions or complaints you may have regarding our products and services

o   To provide recommendations of TV shows and services you might like

Where you’ve given us your consent

o   To send you details of products, services, special offers and rewards that we think will be of interest to you. However, we hate junk mail as much as you do so it's up to you to decide whether or not you want to receive this information. We’ll cover more of that further down.

o   To occasionally carry out market research

o   To administer contests and competitions

Where we process your information on the basis of your consent, you’ve got the right to withdraw your consent at any time.  You can do this by:

• Accessing Marketing Preferences page on your My Virgin Media account, or contacting us
• This won’t affect the lawfulness of anything we’ve done with your information on the basis of consent prior to that point

Where we’ve got a legitimate interest – which is where we’ve got a good reason to process your data; e.g. situations where Virgin Media needs to process information to operate its business. However we always do this by considering the safeguards and impact to you. Processing activities based on a legitimate interest are:

o   To provide you with service information and updates in relation to the products and services you’ve ordered from us

o   To enable us to gain customer insights and to review, develop and improve our products, services and special offers to ensure we are giving customers what they want

o   Defining types of customers for new products or services and personalise service offers to you

o   To check your credit information with credit rating agencies to guarantee payment of our services

o   Complying with laws and regulations that apply to us

o   To provide you with access to additional services, such as Virgin Red

o   To analyse your telephony and mobile internet data to prevent fraud and warn you about nuisance calls

o   To personalise your experience of our services e.g. your interaction with our call centres, digital platforms or of the TV service based on your usage and viewing profile so that we can recommend shows you might enjoy, or tailor advertising contained within our services so that it corresponds with your likely interests. We’ll not, however, use information about your use of third party applications on our TV service to personalise or tailor advertising

o   To provide you with tailored advertising, features and content.  We use the information we hold about you to tailor the adverts, content and features you receive to make them more relevant.

If you don’t wish to received tailored advertising as part of your TiVo service you can switch this off at any time on your set top box by accessing the Help menu and selecting the option to opt out of tailored advertising

Where we’ve got a legal obligation to process personal information:

Virgin Media is required to capture, retain and share some personal data for legal reasons such as:

• Where there’s a need to block unauthorised or illegitimate content
• Responding to courts and enforcement authorities
• To help authorities with any security, crime or anti-terrorism enquiries
• To demonstrate compliance with anti-money laundering rules
• To ensure monitor any other regulatory requirements linked with treating customers fairly and processing records properly.
• Administering call caps

Sometimes we’ll need to share the information we hold about you with others. We provide information about you:

o   To our employees and field agents so they can administer, and deal with any questions or complaints you’ve got about your account with us and/or the products and services provided to you by Virgin Media now or in the future

o   To search the files of a credit reference agency, which will keep a record of that search, when you apply for service. This is so that we can confirm your eligibility for our products and services and guarantee a regular payment for those

o   Additionally, details of how you conduct your account with us may also be disclosed to the credit reference agency. This information may be used by other organisations in assessing applications from you and members of your household

o   For the purposes of fraud prevention and screening preventing nuisance calls

o   We may use aggregate information and statistics for the purposes of monitoring usage of our services in order to help us develop our services, and may provide such aggregate information to third parties, for example, content partners and advertisers. These statistics do not include information that can be used to identify any individual

o   To the marketing agencies we work with when creating marketing campaigns, special offers and promotions targeted for you. We may share your information with our partner companies who provide you with customer service on our behalf or help deliver/provide the product or service you have chosen

o   Our service providers in order for us to provide our services to you, for example if you use the Voice Search functionality on your Virgin TV Go application we may share your audio files with our provider in the United States for storage and processing

o   We may share your information to comply with legal and regulatory obligations to protect or enforce our rights or that of a third party such as analysing activity on our network to help block unauthorised or illegal content access or publication; for the purpose of protecting vital interests, national security, statutory obligations or responding to requests from courts and enforcement authorities

o   Companies that you ask us to share your data with

o   If you’ve got the Virgin Red App to gain access to exclusive offers and competitions

o   TV Apps such as BT Sport Europe, My Nick Jr

• If you use Direct Debits we’ll share your data with the Direct Debit scheme
• If you apply for mobile phone insurance through us we’ll pass your personal details onto the insurer (Asurion)

Where we share your personal data with another company we make sure that they respect your data protection rights too. We do share your personal data with some companies that are based outside the European Economic Area such as India and Philippines – where we have organisations that help with customer care activity and the USA to enable TV stuff.

We only share your data with other controllers if this is directly requested by you, for example for your number porting to a different service provider.

We won’t pass on your personal information to third parties except in accordance with this policy and our Terms and Conditions or where we are required to disclose that information in order to comply with any legal or regulatory requirements.

The security of your information is really important to us. Any information sent to us is protected using robust security methods. The methods we use are industry-standard ensuring data is safeguarded whilst being sent over unprotected communications paths such as the internet. When it reaches us, we store it securely and only provide access to it by those authorised. Although we safeguard your personal information once received, Virgin Media cannot guarantee the safety of any personal information you transmit to us using online methods.

Our security measures include:

o   Encryption of data where appropriate

o   Regular penetration testing of systems

o   Security controls which protect the entire Virgin Media Information Technology infrastructure from external attack and unauthorised access

o   Regular cyber security assessments of all service providers who may handle your personal data

o   Regular scenario planning and crisis management exercises to ensure we are ready to respond to cyber security attacks and data security incidents

o   Internal policies setting out our data security approach

o   Training for employees on security and privacy

We’ll never ask you for your Virgin Media identification, on-line passwords or PIN numbers directly associated with your Virgin Media account in any unsolicited phone calls or unsolicited emails. In accordance with our Terms and Conditions, you’re responsible for keeping your password and PIN secure and we very strongly recommend you do not disclose them to anyone (unless you wish to authorise them to access your account and potentially incur charges on your account).

We collect and store your data safely and only for the time strictly necessary to operate services provided to you by Virgin Media and/or based on the reasons that we process your personal data.  Afterwards it’ll either be destroyed or anonymised.

When determining the relevant time we store information periods, we take into account factors such as: 

• Legal obligation(s) requiring data to be kept for certain periods of time
• (Potential) disputes
• Guidelines issued by the UK’s data protection authority.

A few examples for how long we’ll keep your data:

o   Unless you ask us not to, we store your generic details (i.e. name, surname, contact details) for up to two years after you stop being our customer, to contact you just in case you change your mind

o   In the case of VOD viewing data, we collect and store your TV data for 4 weeks after viewing, after which is deleted or anonymised.

o   We keep your billing data for 7 years, for tax purposes.

Here we’ll explain the rights you have regarding your information:

To exercise any of these rights at any time, check out the Contact Us section.

We’ll automatically contact you with regard to your services, for example, with updates to your services, service disruption messages or bill payments.

We may also, subject to your consent, use your personal information to contact you with information about special offers and rewards. But don't worry, your details won't be shared with other companies for marketing purposes without your consent.

If you’ve given consent for us to contact you, then from time to time, we may contact you by mail, telephone, email, other electronic messaging services (such as text, voice, sound or image messages including using automated calling systems) with information about our products and services (including discounts and special offers).

Managing your Marketing Preferences

If you’d like to change your marketing preferences at any time you can do this in the following ways:

• Sign into My Virgin Media and go to My Profile
• Log into your Virgin Mobile account and go to My Profile
• Clicking on the unsubscribe link in any marketing email from us
• Text STOP in reply to a Marketing SMS send by us
• By calling us. If you’re a Virgin Media customer (TV, VM Store, Broadband and/or landline) call our team on 150 from your landline or 0345 454 1111* from any other phone
• If you’re a Virgin Mobile customer just call our team on 789 from your Virgin Mobile phone, or 0345 6000 789* from any other phone
• By writing to us at Sunderland, SR43 4AA or emailing us at dpo@virginmedia.co.uk

Remember that if you say you don’t wish to receive any promotional material from us, this will preclude you from receiving any of our special offers or promotions which may be of interest to you.

Like most website providers, we use cookies. You can find out everything you need to know about cookies on our dedicated page.

Occasionally our site may provide access to other web sites by linking to them. We’re not responsible for the data policies (including data protection and cookies), content or security of these linked websites. So, it’s a good idea to make sure you refer to their privacy policies to ensure you know how they use your data.