This is our privacy policy. It sets out how we collect, use and share your information, describes your rights and explains how you exercise them.
We sometimes make changes to our privacy policy to make sure it’s up to date, so come back for a read every now and then. We’ll let you know about any big changes.
Before we get started, here’s a few things to help you understand our privacy policy.
Where we talk about ‘you’ or ‘your’, we mean the person whose information we are using. That might be because you:
Where we talk about ‘Virgin Media’ or ‘us’, we mean Virgin Media Limited, Virgin Mobile Telecoms Limited, Virgin Mobile Finance Limited, Virgin Media Payments Limited and/or Virgin Media Business Limited.
When we refer to our ‘Group’, we mean the companies that own or control Virgin Media and any companies that are affiliated with, owned or controlled by Virgin Media.
Virgin Media is a controller of your information in all of the circumstances explained in our privacy policy unless we specifically state that some other organisation is a controller.
Our contact details are here.
You can raise a complaint about how your information is being handled HERE
When we refer to O2, we mean Telefonica UK Limited.
When we refer to VMED O2 UK Limited, we mean the joint venture company with registered number 12580944 and whose registered address is Griffin House, 161 Hammersmith Road, London. UK. W6 8BS
VMED O2 UK Limited owns O2 and Virgin Media. This means O2 and Virgin Media are now part of a joint venture that can offer you more products, services and benefits.
So we can operate our business and the joint venture, and so we can manage our relationship with you, we may share your data between the other members of the joint venture.
O2 and Virgin Media remain separate controllers, so if you have any questions or wish to exercise any of your rights in relation to the data we process, you can still get in touch with us using the contact information in the contact us section of this privacy policy.
For information on O2 products and services and how O2 uses your information, please visit: www.o2.co.uk
This privacy policy doesn’t cover the use of your information by:
We respect your information and only use it for proper and/or lawful purposes to:
We rely on Consent or the Legitimate Interests Legal Basis to use your information for these purposes (improving our products, services and offers and the experience of our prospective and actual customers are our legitimate interests).
We rely on Consent or the Legitimate Interests Legal Basis to use your information for these purposes (ensuring our customers are aware of and have access to our products and services and growing our business are our legitimate interests).
We rely on Consent, Contract Performance or Legitimate Interests Legal Bases to use your information for these purposes.
To analyse your telephony and mobile internet data to prevent fraud and warn you about nuisance calls
We rely on Legal Obligation and Legitimate Interests Legal Bases to use your information to ensure we comply with our legal and regulatory obligations (these are our legitimate interests).
We rely on the Legitimate Interest Legal Basis to use your information for these purposes (developing, managing and protecting our business are our legitimate interests).
We obtain information from credit reference agencies 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 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 these credit reference agencies and the way they operate are explained in more detail at https://www.equifax.co.uk/crain
We sometimes make automated decisions based on personal information you’ve supplied or we’ve collected from others about you. This helps us to make sure the decisions we make are quick, fair and correct based on what we know about you. These automated decisions can affect the products and services that we may offer you. We’ll make sure human intervention is possible where there are any concerns about the decision. We want to make sure decisions about automated decisions such as credit approval are fair and transparent. We use technology to make decisions automatically or to build profiles about you. This technology uses logic that analyses your preferences and how you use our products and services, which helps us to improve your customer experience, making it more relevant for you and allowing you to get the most out of our products and services. What this means for you is that you’ll regularly receive from us personalised content (offers, promotions, TV programmes recommendations etc.).
We also use technology to make decisions automatically based on your credit score analysis. What this means for you is that we’ll decide your eligibility for our products and services based on your credit history. When we perform a credit search, we’ll leave a footprint of that search on your credit record.
We’ll search the files of a credit reference agency, which will keep a record of that search, when you apply for service. 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.
Before we can provide certain services, products or financing to you, we undertake checks for the purposes of verifying your identity and preventing fraud and money laundering. These checks require us to process personal data you’ve provided, we’ve collected from you, or that we’ve received from credit reference agencies (like Equifax) or fraud prevention agencies (like CIFAS). Details of the personal information that will be processed may include a combination of name, address, date of birth, contact details, financial information, employment details and device identifiers including IP address.
We and fraud prevention agencies may also enable law enforcement agencies to access and use your personal data to detect, investigate and prevent crime.
We process your personal data on the basis that we have a legitimate interest in verifying your identity and preventing fraud and money laundering in order to protect our business and to comply with laws that apply to us.
If you don’t become one of our customers, we’ll still keep the result of our fraud checks about you if it’s in our legitimate interests to help prevent or detect fraud. We retain this information for 1 year. Various fraud prevention agencies can hold your personal data for different periods of time, and if you’re considered to pose a fraud or money laundering risk, your data can be held for up to 6 years.
The personal information we’ve collected from you will be shared with fraud prevention agencies who will use it to prevent fraud and money-laundering and to verify your identity. If fraud is detected, you could be refused certain services, finance, or employment.
If you tell us you’re associated with someone else financially (for example, by marriage or civil partnership), we’ll link your records together. So 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.
As part of the processing of your personal data for these purposes, decisions may be made by automated means. This means that our systems may decide that you pose a risk if our processing reveals your behaviour to be consistent with money laundering or known fraudulent conduct, is inconsistent with your previous submissions or you appear to have deliberately hidden your true identity. You have rights in relation to automated decision making if you want to know more, please contact us.
If we, or a fraud prevention agency, determine that you pose a fraud or money laundering risk, we may refuse to provide the services, products or financing you’ve requested, or to employ you, or we may stop providing existing services, products or financing to you.
A record of any fraud or money laundering risk will be retained by the fraud prevention agencies, and may result in others refusing to provide services, products, financing or employment to you. If you have any questions about this, please contact us or visit the CIFAS website for further information www.cifas.org.uk
Whenever fraud prevention agencies transfer your personal information outside of the European Economic Area, they place contractual responsibilities on the organisation receiving it to protect your information to the standard required in the European Economic Area. They may also make the organisation receiving the information subscribe to ‘international frameworks’ aimed at sharing information securely.
We use information we collect from you directly and through your use of our products, networks and services and, in some cases, combined with information we collect from other sources, such as data brokers, to create a profile of you or to place you into groups or segments. These profiles are used:
Some of the processes we use to create and refine these profiles use automated technology and, in some cases, are enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, but they don’t produce decisions which create legal or similarly significant effects for you. You can contact us if you’d like more information on how we use automated or AI-enabled technology to process your personal information.
We acquire data from third parties to inform and develop our profiles. The third parties are listed below with information about how you can contact them to exercise your information rights:
If you’re a TV customer, we analyse your interaction with our customer service centres, websites or other digital platforms, plus your use of our TV services, and combine this with information about who you are to recommend programmes or other TV content you might enjoy. We rely on the Contract Performance Legal Basis here. You can switch off personalisation by going to the settings on your set top box or TV device.
We can show different ads to different TV users based on what we assess to be their likely interests. We don’t deliver these tailored ads on an individual basis, but rather to a group of multiple households using household and set top box information and based on likely or predicted interests. We rely on the Legitimate Interests Legal Basis to use your information in this way (providing customers with more relevant ads and growing our business are legitimate interests).
To enabled tailored ads, we work with:
If you sign up for third-party apps through your Virgin Media TV service, once you subscribe and start using the app, any information you provide to the app developer (for example, Netflix, BT Sport) and the information you generate while you’re using the app, is controlled by the app provider, not Virgin Media. Please visit the app provider’s privacy policy to understand how they use your information and how you can exercise your rights. Your information is shared between us and the app provider to confirm your eligibility to access the app and for billing purposes.
We operate our mobile network using BT, EE and/or Vodafone’s network. If you’re a Virgin Mobile customer and, you have any questions about how your information is used in the course of the service, please contact us.
We may collect and use information about your health in order to support public health situations and protect the health and wellbeing of our customers and our employees. We’ll only collect and use the minimum amount and type of information necessary and will make sure such information is kept secure and only kept by us for the minimum period needed before being securely destroyed.
We’re committed to understanding the needs and preferences of customers in vulnerable circumstances and those with accessibility requirements. We aim to respond to these needs by removing the barriers these customers may face, or by not creating the barriers in the first place. To do this, we collect and use information to help us identify and appropriately support vulnerable customers and those with accessibility needs. We’ll only collect and use this information where we have your consent, or where we have a legal or regulatory obligation to do so. Our Accessibility and Vulnerability policy is at https://www.virginmedia.com/corporate/media-centre/public-policy-statements/accessibility-and-vulnerability-policy.
We may share your information with debt collection agencies where there’s an outstanding debt owed on the account. We do this so that they can use the information, alongside other information that they hold, to attempt to contact you on our behalf so that we can recover the debt. In some cases, where we have been unable to recover the amount owed, we may sell the debt to a third-party debt management company. You’ll be informed when this takes place. Following the sale of the debt, any questions you have about communications you receive should be directed to the company in question.
To market our products and services to prospective and existing customers, we rely on the Legitimate Interests Legal Basis to share information with social media advertising partners (growing our business is our legitimate interest). We share aggregated information (information that does not identify you) and, in some cases, your email address with our social media advertising partners so they can identify people that have similar interests as yours (known as lookalike audiences), to target those other people with Virgin Media offers and promotions. Where your email address has been provided, the advertising partner will promptly delete your information as soon as they’ve identified the lookalike audience. Users of these social media platforms can change their ad settings by reviewing the social media platform’s privacy policy and privacy settings.
We collect your information in different ways.
Most of the information we use is provided to us by you.
You give us information when:
We collect information about you from other people or organisations. Where we obtain your personal information from a third-party or external source, we carry out appropriate checks and take suitable steps to make sure we’re receiving your information in accordance with our data protection obligations. We obtain information from the following sources or companies:
You generate information when you use our products and services.
You generate information in the following circumstances:
Sometimes we’ll need to share the information we hold about you with others. We only share your information with other companies and organisations where we have a legal obligation to do so or otherwise where we’re satisfied that there’s a legitimate need to share the information, and that appropriate checks and suitable measures are in place to make sure the data is shared and protected in accordance with our data protection obligations.
We use the following types of suppliers:
We also share your information with organisations that are not suppliers where we have a legitimate reason to do so.
Other organisations with whom we share your information are:
We collect and store your information safely and only for as long as we need it for the purposes we’ve explained in this privacy policy. Afterwards it’ll either be securely destroyed or anonymised.
When determining the relevant time periods we store information, we take into account the following factors:
You have various rights in relation to your information.
We like to contact you to make sure you don’t miss out on our latest upgrades and offers, and get the best products and services from Virgin Media and our group companies. We only send relevant communications, and we won’t bombard you.
You can update your marketing preferences in My Virgin Media, or Your Account if you have mobile with us. If you aren’t an active Virgin Media customer, you can access your online account for 180 days after full disconnection. Or you can contact us here to opt out of receiving marketing communications from us.
You also have the right to object to your information being used for any direct marketing purposes, not just receiving marketing communications. If you wish to object, please contact us.
Where we use your information for purposes other than marketing on the basis of consent, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us. Our use of your information prior to the withdrawal of consent remains valid.
You have the right to be provided with clear, transparent and easily understandable information about how we use your information and your rights. This is why we’re providing you with the information in this privacy policy.
If you have any questions about our privacy policy, please contact us.
You have the right to obtain access to your information (if we’re processing it), and certain other information about how we use your information (similar to that provided in this privacy policy). This is so you’re aware and can check we’re using your information in accordance with data protection law. In most cases, we won’t charge for this and we’ll do our best to get details back within 30 days.
If you want to access your information, please do so here.
To help you understand your request and our obligations we have answered some frequently asked questions (FAQs) here.
You’re entitled to have your information corrected if it’s inaccurate or incomplete. Please contact us for more details.
This is also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’ and, in simple terms, in certain circumstances enables you to request the deletion or removal of your information where there’s no compelling reason for us to keep using it.
If you want to exercise the right to erasure, please email DataSubjectRights@virginmedia.co.uk
In some circumstances, you have rights to ‘block’ or restrict further use by us of your information. When processing is restricted, we can still store your information, but may not use it further. Where applicable, we keep lists of people who’ve asked for further use of their information to be ‘blocked’ to make sure the restriction is respected in future.
If you want to exercise the right to restriction, please email DataSubjectRights@virginmedia.co.uk
You have rights to obtain and reuse your personal data for your own purposes across different services. e.g. if you decide to switch to a new provider, this enables you to move, copy or transfer your relevant information easily between our IT systems and theirs safely and securely, without affecting its usability, such as your name and address.
If you want to exercise the right to portability, please email DataSubjectRights@virginmedia.co.uk
Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling
We sometimes make automated decisions based on personal information you’ve supplied or we’ve collected from others about you. This helps us to make sure the decisions we make are quick, fair and correct based on what we know about you. These automated decisions can affect the products and services we may offer you. We’ll make sure human intervention is possible where there are any concerns about the decision. We want to make sure decisions about automated decisions such as credit approval are fair and transparent. We use technology to make decisions automatically or to build profiles about you. This technology uses logic that analyses your preferences and how you use our products and services, which helps us to improve your customer experience, making it more relevant for you and allowing you to get the most out of our products and services. This means you’ll regularly receive from us personalised content (offers, promotions, TV programmes recommendations etc.).
We also use technology to make decisions automatically based on your credit score analysis, which allows us to guarantee your regular payments for our products and services. This means we’ll decide your eligibility for our products and services based on your credit history.
You have the right to object to our use of automated decision making in some circumstances. Please remember that if you object to certain types of automated decision making, it may affect our ability to provide you with the optimum level of customer service and our ability to provide you with certain products, financing and services. To find out more about your rights to object to certain kinds of processing, please visit the ‘Right to Object’ section below for more information.
You have the right to object to your information being used by us in certain circumstances, including processing for direct marketing and automated decision making.\n\n\nIf you want to exercise the right to object, please contact us.
Complaints
If you’d like to make a complaint about how we use your information, please contact us HERE and we’ll do our best to help. If you aren’t satisfied with our response to your question or concern, or believe our processing of your information doesn’t comply with data protection law, you can make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/.
Contacting us
For queries about Virgin Media's services, please call our team on 0345 454 1111 or dial 150 from a Virgin Media phone line. If you’re a Virgin Mobile customer, dial 789 from your Virgin Mobile phone, or 0345 6000 789* from any other phone. If you have any queries or comments about this privacy notice, please write to Data Protection Officer, Virgin Media Limited, 500 Brook Drive, Green Park, Reading. RG2 6UU or contact Virgin Media’s Data Protection Officer by emailing dpo@virginmedia.co.uk
Where you’ve got access to Virgin Media products and/or services but you’re not the account holder, Virgin Media will need contact to be made and/or authorised via the account holder. We don’t want to share information with anyone unless we know who they are and this can be difficult without proof. Please be assured we’re acting in your best interests.
*For details about how much it costs to call our team from a non-Virgin Media home phone, visit virginmedia.com/call costs. Call costs from other networks and mobiles vary.
Version 1.3
Last updated 2 June 2021