Privacy policy

Your privacy is fundamental to SMUD.

In this policy, we'll discuss how we collect, use, disclose, transfer, and store your information and other topics affecting your information. Please take some time to read about our privacy practices and let us know if you have any questions.

Your personal information

SMUD's commitment to your privacy

To make sure your personal information is secure, we communicate our privacy and security guidelines to SMUD employees and strictly enforce privacy safeguards within our organization.

"Personal information" is any record that identifies an individual person. Examples are social security numbers, address, name, phone numbers, birth dates, and billing, credit, and energy use data specific to you.

To ensure your privacy, SMUD's Board of Directors adopted an Information Management and Security Policy. In brief, we do not release to a third party any of your information that is proprietary or private without your written consent. The only exception is for information that's reasonably required to meet SMUD's business needs, for example:

• To provide or bill for electrical power.
• To maintain or operate SMUD's electric system or grid.
• To plan, implement or evaluate energy-use programs, such as energy management, demand response, or energy efficiency.
• To comply with a law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, such as a request from law enforcement, or a government agency when necessary for the performance of official duties, or a court order.

What personal information we collect

We collect customer information having to do with our business relationship with you and your use of our utility services. Here are some examples:

• Contact information that allows us to communicate with you, including your name, address, telephone number, SMUD account number and email address.
• Information about your financial relationship with us, including your payment data credit history, and Social Security number
• Electric usage data gathered by our metering systems
• Information gathered when you choose to take part in one of our programs, such as HomePower℠ or Greenergy®
• Information about your use of the smud.org website, as well as any other media form, media channel, mobile website or mobile application related, linked or otherwise connected thereto (collectively, the "Site")

When we collect personal information

We gather personal information at different times, including:

• When you set up your account and interact with us about it or about your electric service and your participation in our programs.
• When you use electricity, usage data is collected via our metering systems.
• When you choose to engage with us through our Site (view our Terms and Conditions)
• When we interact with third parties such as credit agencies.

How we use personal information

We use personal information to administer your account and inform you about your energy usage. We also use it to manage and improve our services and business operations. Some examples include:

• To prepare your customer billing statement and in connection with billing and payment on your account.
• To enable you to see your energy usage data via secure access on the Internet at smud.org
• To communicate with you about -
  • your energy use,
  • specific programs or opportunities we offer that may help you to lower your energy use or gain other benefits.
• To provide you services or to complete your transactions or requests.
• To administer sweepstakes, contests, or similar promotions in which you've entered your name.

In some instances, when you're on our Site, we may transfer you to an outside service provided by a third-party operator. Occasionally, this new content may still seem to be a part of our Site. In that case, we'll have an agreement in place with the third party that it will keep your personal information confidential and use it only to help us serve you.

How we protect personal information

SMUD takes precautions -- including administrative, technical, and physical measures -- to safeguard your personal information against loss, theft, and misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction.

SMUD uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption on all web pages where personal information is collected. Doing so protects the confidentiality of your personal information while it is transmitted to SMUD.

When you post on a social networking service, the personal information you share is visible to other users and can be read, collected, or used by them. You are responsible for the personal information you choose to share. For example, if you provide your name and email address on a social networking service, that information is public. Please take care when using these features.

Access, integrity and retention of personal information

SMUD makes it easy for you to keep your personal information accurate, complete, and up to date. Just log into your account on our Site and update it.

For other personal information, we make good faith efforts to give you access so you can ask us to correct the data if it is inaccurate or to delete the data if SMUD is not required by law or for legitimate business purposes to keep it.

We may decline to process requests that are unreasonably repetitive, require disproportionate technical effort, jeopardize the privacy of others, are extremely impractical, or for which access is not otherwise required by law.

You can request access, correction, or deletion by emailing us at privacy@smud.org.

We'll keep your personal information for the time necessary to fulfill the purposes we've outlined in "How we collect and use customers' personal information" of this Privacy Policy, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law.

Children's privacy

We like to share energy and safety information with students. For example, we give free classroom materials to teachers on energy awareness and safety, and areas of our Site that share information about energy and safety are intended for children.

Because we share our customers' concern that children's privacy is not to be risked, please note that since we don't monitor the ages of those who use our Site, parents and guardians must monitor children's use, and children under the age of 18 must not submit personal information on our Site without the consent of a parent or guardian.

How we collect and use customers' non-personal information

SMUD also may combine data about your electricity use in various formats so that it cannot be identified personally with you. For example, we could summarize total energy use for all homes and businesses in a certain geographic area. This kind of aggregated data is not subject to privacy restrictions. We use the information to manage, provide, and improve our services and business operations. Here are some examples:

• To analyze rates and rate structures.
• To project usage demand patterns and electric load, plot growth, and identify load centers.
• To improve our energy supply planning and to better design and engineer our energy distribution systems.

We collect other non-personal information in a form that does not identify specific individuals and we use, transfer, and disclose it for many purposes. The following are some examples of non-personal information that we collect and how we may use it:

• We may gather information -- such as occupation, language, and zip code -- so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising.
• We also may collect information regarding customer activities on our Site. We combine this information and use it to learn what's most useful to our customers and to understand which parts of our Site and services are of most interest.

If we do combine non-personal information with personal information, we protect the combined information as private and personal for as long as it is combined.

Cookies and other technologies

SMUD's Site, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use "cookies" and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. These technologies help us better understand user behavior, tell us which parts of our Site people visit most often, and measure the effectiveness of advertisements and web searches. We treat information collected by cookies and other technologies as non-personal information.

However, when Internet Protocol (IP) addresses or similar identifiers are considered personal information by local law, we protect these identifiers as private and personal. As is true of most sites, we gather some information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes IP addresses, browser type and language, Internet service provider (ISP), referring and exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and "clickstream" statistics. We use this information to understand and analyze trends, to administer the site, to learn about customer behavior on our Site, and to gather aggregate demographic information about those who use our Site. We may use this information in our marketing and advertising services.

In some of our email messages, we use a "click-through URL" linked to content on our Site. When customers click one of these URLs, they pass through a separate web server before arriving at the destination page on our Site. We track this click-through data to help us determine interest in particular topics and measure the effectiveness of our customer communications. If you prefer not to be tracked in this way, just don't click text or graphic links in the email messages.

Pixel tags enable us to send email messages in a format customers can read, and they tell us whether mail has been opened. We may use this information to reduce or eliminate messages sent to customers.

How we respond to Do Not Track signals

California law requires us to let you know how we respond to web browser Do Not Track (DNT) signals. Due to a lack of industry or legal standards regarding how to recognize or honor DNT signals, SMUD does not currently respond to them. When the privacy community is able to standardize how and when service providers should respond to such signals, SMUD will appropriately respond to browser DNT signals.

Google Analytics

Google cookies may be used to collect information about the use of our Site and services and to provide that information to Google Analytics. This cookie tracks site usage information such as how often users visit our Site, what pages they visit, and what other sites they visited prior to coming to our Site (similar to the cookies described above). SMUD uses the information we get from Google Analytics only to improve SMUD's web-based service offerings. Google Analytics collects your device's IP address, rather than your name or other identifying information, and SMUD does not combine the information collected through the use of Google Analytics with any other information you may have provided to us. Learn more about how SMUD and Google use this information at http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/. Although it may result in a less desirable experience, you can prevent Google Analytics from recognizing you on subsequent visits to our Site by disabling cookies in your browser.

Disclosing information to third parties

At times SMUD may make some personal information available to strategic partners that work with SMUD to provide services. Personal information will be shared only to provide or improve services and advertising; it will not be shared with third parties for their marketing purposes.

Service providers

SMUD shares personal information with companies that provide services, such as information processing, credit reporting, managing and enhancing customer data, customer service, assessing interest in our services, and conducting customer research or satisfaction surveys. These companies are obligated by contract with SMUD to protect your information.

Others

It may be necessary − by law, legal process, litigation, or requests from public and governmental authorities − for SMUD to disclose your personal information. We may also disclose information about you if we determine that for purposes of national security, law enforcement, or other issues of public importance, disclosure is necessary or appropriate.

We may also disclose information about you if we see that disclosure is reasonably necessary to enforce our terms and conditions or to protect our operations or users.

Third-party sites and services

While browsing our Site, you may encounter hypertext links to other websites. These third-party websites may send their own cookies to you, log your IP address, and otherwise collect data or solicit personal information. SMUD does not control and is not responsible for what third parties do for their websites, or how they handle your personal information. Please be cautious and consult the privacy policies posted on each third-party website for further information.

Digital communication terms of service

To communicate with you, SMUD uses contact information provided by customers as well as information obtained from other sources. The terms of service provides you with detailed information about how we interact with you through voice calls and text (SMS) messages.

Voice calls and alerts

1. From time to time, SMUD may contact you regarding information concerning your utility service, including outage information, bill-related alerts, notices regarding work on or near your property and other SMUD programs, products, services, and marketing and promotional opportunities.
2. By providing your contact telephone number to SMUD and accepting these Terms of Service, you acknowledge and agree that: (a) you can be reached at the stated phone number, (b) you give SMUD permission to send pre-recorded or artificial voice calls to you at that number, regardless whether that number is on any federal or state “Do Not Call” lists, unless and until you revoke that permission as described in these Terms of Service; and (c) you give SMUD permission to place these calls using an automatic telephone dialing system.
3. Consenting to receive automated calls from SMUD is not required to obtain any good or service from SMUD. You can stop receiving most voice calls from SMUD at any time by doing any of the following:
   1. Calling us at 1-888-742-SMUD (7683). When you reach a SMUD representative, inform them that you would no longer like to receive pre-recorded voice alerts from SMUD. They can help you manage your communication preferences.
   2. Changing your communication preferences in My Account. If, after opting-out, you want to join again, you can update your communications preferences in the Preference Center within My Account.
   3. Please note that even if you opt out of certain communications from SMUD, SMUD may still send you some automated alerts, including, for example, emergency and safety-related communications.

SMS messages

SMUD service and marketing alerts

1. From time to time, SMUD may contact you via text message (SMS) regarding information concerning your utility service, including outage information, bill-related alerts, notices regarding work on or near your property and other SMUD programs, products, services, and marketing and promotional opportunities.
2. By providing your mobile device number to SMUD and accepting these Terms of Service, you acknowledge and agree that: (a) you are the authorized user of the mobile device receiving service at that number; (b) you give SMUD permission to send text messages to you at that number, regardless whether that number is on any federal or state “Do Not Call” lists, unless and until you revoke that permission as described in these SMS Terms of Service; and (c) you give SMUD permission to send these texts using an automatic telephone dialing system.
3. Consenting to receive texts from SMUD is not required to obtain any good or service from SMUD. You can stop receiving most text messages from SMUD, other than customer service request responses from SMS 27683 which are described below, at any time by doing any of the following:
   1. Replying “STOP” to SMS short codes 697683 or 58193. After you send the message “STOP” to us, we will send you a message to confirm that you have been unsubscribed from that list.
   2. Calling us at 1-888-742-SMUD (7683). When you reach a SMUD representative, inform them that you would no longer like to receive text messages from SMUD. They can help you manage your communication preferences.
   3. Changing your communication preferences in My Account. If, after opting out, you want to join again, you can update your communications preferences in the Preference Center within My Account.
   4. Please note that even if you opt out of certain communications from SMUD, SMUD may still send you some types of text messages and other automated alerts, including, for example, emergency and safety-related communications.
4. If you are experiencing issues with a service or marketing message for which you’ve subscribed, you can reply to any text from SMUD with the word “HELP” for more assistance, or you can get help directly at info@smud.org.
5. While SMUD does not charge you any fees for text messages, as always, your carrier’s message and data rates may apply, and message frequency will vary. SMUD and your wireless carrier(s) are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. If you have any questions about your carrier’s text or data plan, it is best to contact your wireless provider directly.

SMUD Customer Service Requests

By providing consent to a SMUD customer service representative, you agree to receive a one-time text message from SMS Short Code 27683 with a link to the information you’ve requested.

Although this is not a subscription service, you can opt-out of using this feature any time by texting “STOP” to 27683. After you send the message “STOP” to us, we will send you a message confirming you will no longer be able to receive one-time informational requests via this Short Code. Please note, replying “STOP” to this Short Code does not opt you out of receiving text messages from other SMUD Short Codes for which you have provided consent.  If you wish to use this feature to request information in the future, you can opt back in by texting “START” to 27683.

If at any time you forget what keywords are supported, just text “HELP” to 27683 or call 1-888-742-SMUD (7683).

Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. Message and Data Rates May Apply for any messages sent to you from us and to us from you. If you have any questions about your text plan or data plan, it is best to contact your wireless provider.

Participating Carriers: Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, U.S. Cellular, AT&T, Boost, Virgin, MetroPCS

Questions

If you have any questions or concerns about SMUD's Privacy Policy or data processing, please contact us.

SMUD may update its Privacy Policy from time to time. When we change the policy in a material way, we'll post a notice on our Site along with the updated Privacy Policy.

Last updated: March 22, 2024

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