Effective date: 23 July 2024
dcbel Inc. and its affiliates (“dcbel,” “we,” “our,” and/or “us”) value the privacy of the individuals
who use our Home Energy Stations and Home Simulator (collectively, our “Products”), mobile applications
and App Hub, website, and other online services (our “Services”). This privacy policy (the “Privacy
Policy”) explains how we collect, use, and disclose personal information from users of our Services
(“Users”, “you”, and/or “your”). If you are located in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or the United
Kingdom (“UK”), “personal information” means any information relating to an identified or identifiable
individual. By using our Services, you agree to the collection, use, disclosure, and procedures this
Privacy Policy describes. Beyond the Privacy Policy, your use of our Services is also subject to
our General Terms and Conditions.
INFORMATION WE COLLECT
We may collect a variety of information from or about you or your devices from various sources, as
described below.
If you do not provide your personal information when requested, you may not be able to use our Services
if that personal information is necessary to provide you with our Services or if we are legally required
to collect it.
Information You Provide to Us
Account Information. If you create an account on our Services, we ask you for
personal information such as your name, address, email address, phone number, and information about your
residence. We may also ask you to provide the Energy Information described below.
Reservations and Purchases. If you pre-order or purchase products through our
Services, we ask for personal information such as your name, email address, phone number, billing and
shipping address, and information about your residence. In addition, your payment-related information,
such as your credit card or other financial information, is collected by our third-party payment
processor on our behalf. We may also ask you to provide the Energy Information described below.
Communications. If you contact us directly, we may receive additional personal
information about you. For example, if you contact us for customer support or communicate with us
through the chat bot on our Services, we may receive your name, email address, phone number, the
contents of the message and any attachments you send to us, and any other personal information you
choose to provide. If you sign up for our newsletter or to receive updates, news, or other promotional
information from us, we will collect certain personal information from you, such as your email address.
To learn how to deliver a better customer experience and improve our Services, when we send you emails,
we may use embedded pixels or other technologies to track information about your receipt of and
interaction with our emails, such as whether and when you open them, whether you access any links
included in them, whether you forward our emails and to whom, your Location Information (described
below), and your Device Information (described below).
Your Contacts. We may provide you with the ability to invite other individuals
such as friends or family to share access to your content. We will ask you for the email address of any
such individuals and automatically send an email invitation on your behalf.
Energy Information. We may also ask for energy-related information such as
information about your electric utility rate, electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle make/model and vehicle
identification number (VIN), energy storage system, and rooftop solar system.
SHIP Application. If you apply to be a Smart Home Integration Partner (SHIP)
through our Services, we ask for personal information such as your name, title, company name and
website, phone number, email address, country, and zip code. We will also collect any additional
personal information you choose to provide.
Information We Collect When You Use Our Services
Location Information. When you access our website, we may infer your general
location information, for example, by using your internet protocol (IP) address. We also collect precise
location information from users of our Products, such as during the installation and commissioning
process.
Device Information. We receive information about the device and software you use
to access our Services, such as your IP address, web browser type, operating system version, phone
carrier and manufacturer, application installations, device identifiers, mobile advertising identifiers,
and push notification tokens.
Usage Information. To help us understand how you use our Services and to help us
improve them, we automatically receive information about your interactions with our Services, such as
referring/exit pages, the pages or other content you view, the searches you conduct, the purchases you
make, the products you consider purchasing, and the dates and times of your visits.
Information Automatically Collected from Our Products. If you have one of our
Products, we automatically receive information related to your household energy consumption and
production. For example, we collect information from sensors built into our Products such as time of
day, instantaneous and total household loads, instantaneous and total charging loads, and instantaneous
and total solar energy production. If you change settings like preferred time-of-use charging times, we
will collect and use that information to learn your desired operating modes in different situations.
Every time your system charges or discharges EVs or generates solar power, we collect the time and
duration during which your system was on in order to offer you features such as usage history and total
and net generation and consumption. In order to improve your experience over time and help troubleshoot
any problem you may encounter with our Products, we may also record your unit’s model and serial number,
software version, and technical information such as unit configuration.
Information from Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies. We and third-party
partners collect personal information using cookies, pixel tags, SDKs, or other tracking
technologies. Our third-party partners, such as analytics and advertising partners, may use these
technologies to collect information about your online activities over time and across different
services. Cookies are small text files containing a string of alphanumeric characters. We may use
both session cookies and persistent cookies. A session cookie disappears after you close your browser. A
persistent cookie remains after you close your browser and may be used by your browser on subsequent
visits to our Services. Cookies can be used for performance management, collecting information on
how our Services are being used for analytics purposes. They can also be used for functionality
management, enabling us to make your visit more efficient by, for example, remembering language
preferences, passwords, and log-in details. We may also use pixel tags and web beacons on our Services.
These are tiny graphic images placed on web pages or in our emails that allow us to determine whether
you have performed a specific action. Below is an overview of the types of cookies we and third parties
may use to collect personal information.
- Strictly Necessary Cookies. Some cookies are strictly necessary to make our
Services available to you. We cannot provide you with our Services without this type of cookie. We use
the following necessary cookies:
| Name |
More Information |
Retention |
|
|
|
- Functional Cookies. Functional cookies are used to recognize you when you return to
our Services. This enables us to adapt our content for you and remember your preferences. We use the
following functional cookies:
| Name |
More Information |
Retention |
sa-user-id
sa-user-id-v2
sa-user-id-v3 |
StackAdapt sets this cookie as a third party advertising cookie to record information about a
user’s website activity, such as the pages visited and the locations viewed, to enable us to
provide users with interest-based content and personalised advertisements on external websites.
|
1 year |
| muc_ads |
Twitter sets this cookie to collect user behaviour and interaction data to optimize the website.
|
1 year 1 month 4 days |
| personalization_id |
Twitter sets this cookie to integrate and share features for social media and also store
information about how the user uses the website, for tracking and targeting. |
1 year 1 month 4 days |
| _vwo_uuid_v2 |
This cookie is set by Visual Website Optimiser and calculates unique traffic on a website. |
1 year |
- Analytical or Performance Cookies. We also use cookies for website analytics
purposes in order to operate, maintain and improve our Services. We may use our own analytics cookies
or use third-party analytics providers. These providers may also collect information about your use of
other websites, apps, and online resources. We also use the following analytical or performance
cookies:
Please review your web browser’s “Help” file to learn the proper way to modify your cookie settings,
but note that modifying your cookie settings will not affect other tracking technologies we utilize.
Please note that if you delete or choose not to accept cookies from the Services, you may not be able to
utilize the features of the Services to their fullest potential. You can find more information about
your rights and choices, and how to block the use of certain cookies in the section Your Rights and
Choices below.
Information We Receive from Third Parties
Smart Home Integration Partners (SHIPs). If you receive an Ara Device from one of our
SHIPs, we may receive information about you, such as your address, the location and photos of the
installation, or information about your house related to the installation, from our SHIP. We use this
information to validate proper installation and improve performance of our Services.
Electric Utilities. With your consent, we may receive information from your electronic
utility such as your name, service address, billing information, account information, and current and
historical energy usage information.
Other Third Parties. We may also receive information from our partners and other
sources and combine that with the information in your account. For example, in order to offer incentive
programs, we might receive information such as which of our partners offers services where you live to
determine eligibility for these programs. We may also receive information such as device telemetry and
usage data from third parties such as automotive partners and residential battery partners.
HOW WE USE THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT
We may use the personal information we collect:
- To provide, maintain, improve, and enhance our Services, including to make assessments and
recommendations about products, safety, or energy use;
- To personalize your experience on our Services, such as by providing tailored content and
recommendations;
- To understand and analyze how you use our Services and develop new products, services, features, and
functionality;
- To communicate with you and individuals you invite to access your account as an additional
authorized user, provide you with updates and other information relating to our Services, products and
services, provide information that you request, respond to comments and questions, and otherwise
provide customer support;
- For marketing and advertising purposes, such as developing and providing promotional and advertising
materials that may be relevant, valuable or otherwise of interest to you;
- To generate anonymized, aggregate data containing only de-identified, non-personal information that
we may use for purposes such as research and development and publishing reports;
- To send you text messages;
- To facilitate reservations, transactions, and payments;
- To facilitate the connection of third-party services or applications;
- To find and prevent fraud, and respond to trust and safety issues that may arise;
- For compliance purposes, including enforcing our Terms of Service or other legal rights, or as may
be required by applicable laws and regulations or requested by any judicial process or governmental
agency; and
- For other purposes for which we provide specific notice at the time the personal information is
collected.
LEGAL BASES FOR PROCESSING EUROPEAN INFORMATION
If you are located in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or the United Kingdom
(“UK”), we only process your personal information when we have a valid “legal basis”,
including as set forth below.
- Contractual Necessity. We need your personal information to provide you with our
Services, including but not limited to delivering our Terms of Service (URL). For example, we may need
to process your personal information to respond to your inquiries or requests.
- Legitimate Interests. We or a third party have a legitimate interest in using
your personal information. Specifically, we have a legitimate interest in using your personal
information for: offering and improving our products and Services; developing new products and
Services; understanding how people use our products and Services; performing research that improves
our Services for our users and benefits the public; sending you direct marketing and other
communications from dcbel; protecting against harm to the rights, property, and safety of dcbel, our
users, and the public; detecting, preventing or otherwise addressing fraud, abuse, security or
technical issues with our Services; maintaining and improving the integrity of our computing systems,
and protecting our users’ data security; and enforcing legal claims, including investigation of
potential violations of applicable Terms of Service. We only rely on our or a third party’s legitimate
interests to process your personal information when these interests are not overridden by your rights
and interests.
- Compliance with a Legal Obligation. We have a legal obligation to use your personal
information. For example, we may process your personal information to comply with a legal process or
an enforceable government request, or our tax, labor and accounting obligations.
- Consent. You have consented to the use of your personal information. For
example, we may use cookies where you have consented to such use.
HOW WE DISCLOSE THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT
Authorized Users. We may provide you with the ability to enable additional
authorized users to access your account. If you do so, the additional authorized users may view your
information such as your name and address and control your device.
Vendors, Service Providers, and Technicians. We may disclose any information we
receive with vendors, service providers, and technicians retained in connection with the provision of
our Services.
Smart Home Integration Partners (SHIPs). If you receive our products from one of our
SHIPs, we will disclose information such as your email address and phone number with the SHIP to help
facilitate the installation and integration of our product. SHIPs may also use this information to send
you promotional information about their products and services, as described below.
Business Partners. We may disclose your contact information with our business
partners, such as SHIPs and developers who provide applications through our App Hub, so that they may
send you promotional information about their products and services.
Analytics Partners. We use analytics services such as Google Analytics to collect
and process certain analytics data. You can learn more about Google’s practices by visiting https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.
Advertising Partners. We work with third-party advertising partners to show you
ads that we think may interest you. Some of our advertising partners are members of the Network
Advertising Initiative (https://optout.networkadvertising.org) or the
Digital Advertising Alliance (https://optout.aboutads.info). If you do not wish to
receive personalized ads, please visit their opt-out pages to learn about how you may opt out of
receiving web-based personalized ads from member companies. You can access any settings offered by your
mobile operating system to limit ad tracking, or you can install the AppChoices mobile app to learn more
about how you may opt out of personalized ads in mobile apps.
As Required By Law and Similar Disclosures. We may access, preserve, and disclose
your personal information if we believe doing so is required or appropriate to: (a) comply with law
enforcement requests and legal process, such as a court order or subpoena; (b) respond to your requests;
or (c) protect your, our, or others’ rights, property, or safety.
Merger, Sale, or Other Asset Transfers. We may transfer your personal information
to service providers, advisors, potential transactional partners, or other third parties in connection
with the consideration, negotiation, or completion of a corporate transaction in which we are acquired
by or merged with another company or we sell, liquidate, or transfer all or a portion of our assets. The
use of your information following any of these events will be governed by the provisions of this Privacy
Policy in effect at the time the applicable information was collected.
Consent. We may also disclose your personal information with your permission.
THIRD PARTIES
Our Services may contain links to other websites, products, or services that we do not own or operate.
We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these third parties. Please be aware that this
Privacy Policy does not apply to your activities on these third-party services or any information you
disclose to these third parties. We encourage you to read their privacy policies before providing any
information to them.
RETENTION
We take measures to delete your personal information or keep it in a form that does not permit
identifying you when this information is no longer necessary for the purposes for which we process it,
unless we are required by law to keep this information for a longer period. We generally store your
personal information to our servers until you delete or edit it, or for as long as you remain a dcbel
customer in order to provide you with our Services. We may also store your personal information to
resolve disputes, establish legal defenses, conduct audits, pursue legitimate business purposes, enforce
our agreements and comply with applicable laws. When we process personal information for our own
purposes, we determine the retention period by taking into account various criteria, such as the type of
Services provided to you, the nature and length of our relationship with you, possible re-enrollment
with our Services, the impact on the Services we provide to you if we delete some information from or
about you, and mandatory retention periods provided by law and the statute of limitations.
SECURITY
We make reasonable efforts to protect your personal information by using safeguards designed to improve
the security of the personal information we maintain. However, as no electronic transmission or storage
of information can be entirely secure, we can make no guarantees as to the security or privacy of your
personal information.
CHILDREN
We do not knowingly collect, maintain, or use personal information from children under 16 years of age,
and no part of our Services is directed to children. If you learn that a child has provided us with
personal information in violation of this Privacy Policy, then you may alert us at privacy@dcbel.energy.
YOUR RIGHTS AND CHOICES
Energy Behavior. You can delete the information on your dcbel device by resetting
it to the defaults (using Reset in the Settings menu). You can access, amend or delete your personal
information from our servers through the controls in your account.
Marketing Communications. You can unsubscribe from our promotional emails and
newsletters via the link provided in the emails. Even if you opt out of receiving promotional messages
from us, you will continue to receive administrative messages from us.
If you choose not to provide us with the personal information we collect, some features of our Services
may not work as intended.
Your California Privacy Rights. If you reside in California and have provided
your personal information to us, you may request information once per calendar year about our
disclosures of certain categories of personal information to third parties for their direct marketing
purposes. Such requests must be submitted to us in writing at privacy@dcbel.energy or our address in the “Contact
Us” section, below.
Your European Privacy Rights. If you are located in the EEA or the UK, you have
additional rights described below.
- You may request access to the personal information we maintain about you, update and correct
inaccuracies in your personal information, restrict or object to the processing of your personal
information, have your personal information anonymized or deleted, as appropriate, or exercise your
right to data portability to easily transfer your personal information to another company. In
addition, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, including in your
country of residence, place of work or where an incident took place.
- You may withdraw any consent you previously provided to us regarding the processing of your personal
information at any time and free of charge. We will apply your preferences going forward and this will
not affect the lawfulness of the processing before you withdrew your consent.
You may exercise these rights, as applicable, through controls in the dcbel application or by
contacting us using the contact details at the end of this Privacy Policy. Before fulfilling your
request, we may ask you to provide reasonable information to verify your identity. Please note that
there are exceptions and limitations to each of these rights, and that while any changes you make will
be reflected in active user databases instantly or within a reasonable period of time, we may retain
personal information for backups, archiving, prevention of fraud and abuse, analytics, satisfaction of
legal obligations, or where we otherwise reasonably believe that we have a legitimate reason to do so.
Also, exercising certain of these rights, such as the right to object to the processing of your personal
information, may impact your use of the Services.
How to Block Cookies. You can block cookies by setting your internet browser to
block some or all cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including
essential Cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our Services. By using our Services,
you consent to our use of cookies and our processing of personal information collected through such
Cookies, in accordance with this Privacy Policy. You can withdraw your consent at any time by deleting
placed cookies and disabling cookies in your browser, or as explained below. You can change your browser
settings to block or notify you when you receive a cookie, delete cookies or browse our Services using
your browser’s anonymous usage setting. Please refer to your browser instructions or help screen to
learn more about how to adjust or modify your browser settings. If you do not agree to our use of
cookies or similar technologies which store information on your device, you should change your browser
settings accordingly. You should understand that some features of our Services may not function properly
if you do not accept cookies or these technologies. Where required by applicable law, you will be asked
to consent to certain cookies and similar technologies before we use or install them on your computer or
other device.
INTERNATIONAL TRANSFERS OF DATA
Our Services are hosted in the United States and intended for visitors located within the United
States. If you choose to use the Services from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom,
Switzerland or other regions of the world with laws governing data collection and use that may differ
from U.S. law, then please note that you are transferring your personal information outside of those
regions to the U.S. for storage and processing. We may transfer personal information from the EEA,
the UK or Switzerland to the U.S. and other third countries based on approved Standard Contractual
Clauses, or otherwise in accordance with applicable data protection laws such as based on an appropriate
adequacy decision when transferring personal information to Canada. Also, we may transfer your
personal information from the U.S. to other countries or regions in connection with storage and
processing of personal information, fulfilling your requests, and operating the Services. By providing
any information, including personal information, on or to the Services, you consent to such transfer,
storage, and processing. For more information about the tools that we use to transfer personal
information, you can contact us as described below.
UPDATE YOUR ACCOUNT INFORMATION
You can update your account information or close your account through your profile settings.
CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY
We will post any adjustments to the Privacy Policy on this page, and the revised version will be
effective when it is posted. If we materially change the ways in which we use or disclose personal
information previously collected from you through the Services, we will notify you through the Services,
by email, or other communication.
CONTACT US
Dcbel is responsible as the data controller for processing your personal information. If you have any
questions, comments, or concerns about our processing activities, please email us at privacy@dcbel.energy or write to us at:
dcbel Inc.
attention: Legal Affairs
4700 de la Savane
Montreal, QC Canada H4P 1T7
