Last Updated: February 28th, 2020
Protecting the security and privacy of your personal data is important to Stem. In order for you to understand our data privacy policies, we have outlined below what personal data we collect on our websites and via our services, how we use that data, data security measures we employ, and with whom we may share the data.
There are instances on our primary company websites where we ask you to provide personal information such as name, address, phone number, email address, and similar information. This type of information will improve your website experience or allow us to follow-up with you after you visit our site. Our primary company website’s contact form requires you to give us contact information, including email addresses, telephone numbers, and other personal contact information. We use customer contact information from the form to send you information about our company and its products and services. Your contact information will also be used to contact you when necessary.
We also have a separate customer application website which also may be accessed from our primary company website. Website visitors’ requests for information about our power monitoring service and our products which originate on this separate website are directed back to our primary company website and information is collected as we do for all information requests from the primary website, as described above. Our customer application website uses an order form for our customers to register power monitoring service received as part of power monitoring and related services from Stem. For our customers who have access to the customer application website, we may make those services available on a subscription basis. We obtain information from you when you inquire about the services we offer, when you initially register for the service, and when you purchase additional services from us.
If you are registering the initial customer application service which you received when you received Stem equipment, we obtain the following information from you: first and last names, a password, a valid email address as a log-in, and equipment site address. Your equipment installer may also be asked to provide certain technical information to Stem, such as a meter type, meter number, circuit breaker size, location and power and energy usage, to enable us to better provide you with the energy monitoring service. By registering for the monitoring service, you consent to Stem obtaining technical information about your energy system and its installation from your equipment installer.
If you purchase additional services from us, in addition to the information we collect on initial registration, we may also obtain from you a billing address and a valid credit card or other payment information to process payment for services ordered.
The customer application service itself includes an automated, Internet-based process of receiving transmissions from the Stem power monitoring equipment and other variables. This information is recorded and preserved by Stem on our company computer storage facilities, and may be accessed by you and by us whether or not you subscribe to that service. The Stem PowerMonitor immediately begins reporting this information to Stem and will continue to do so. We retain this information indefinitely, and we may use it for any purpose, in our sole discretion, including but not limited to quality assurance, engineering performance comparisons, product improvements, and providing such information to third party utilities (and their approved vendors) as well as customer-contracted energy service companies.
From time to time, we also may ask you to complete surveys or answer questions regarding your satisfaction with any Stem products you have purchased and services you have received from us. We use this information to improve our services to our customer application service customers. We retain this information indefinitely. We may also ask you whether you would be willing to have information about your experience with our products and services used in our company’s marketing to other potential customers. We will ask you to separately agree to this use of some of this information, and you will have to “opt-in” to this use of your information. The information which we will use in marketing will not identify you by name or address, but will instead use only the general geographic location (city or town and state), comments from you, the physical performance data from your equipment installation which is stored on our computer storage facilities and other site-specific information as approved by you. In addition, as described above, we may use data transmitted automatically by your Stem PowerMonitor for any purpose. Any and all of this information may be aggregated with information from other customers or provided individually as an example of customer experience with our products. For the avoidance of doubt, you should understand that Stem shares certain customer data with utilities (and their approved vendors) as well as customer-contracted energy service companies, and that such shared information may not be anonymized We retain such information indefinitely. Because our services are provided online and may be paid for by credit card (or by other means which we approve), by necessity we provide some of your information to third parties. We contract with other companies and individuals to assist us in performing certain functions on our behalf. Examples include sending postal mail and email, analyzing data, providing marketing assistance and processing credit card payments. These service providers only have access to personal information necessary to perform their functions, but may not use it for other purposes, and must process the information in strict compliance with applicable law.
Our website permits you, after you have logged on, to modify your account information, including address, email address, telephone number, and similar information.
When you access both of our websites, we may automatically (i.e., not by registration) collect certain data (for example, the type of Internet browser and operating system used, domain name of the website from which you came to our website, number of visits, average time spent on the page, pages viewed). We use this information to improve the visitor experience to our website. We also may use your Internet address (“Internet Protocol address” or “IP address”) and other information collected automatically to help diagnose problems with our server, and to administer our website. In addition, as described above, your Stem PowerMonitor automatically reports information to us about your energy, power, and other variables. We may use this information for any purpose, in our sole discretion, as described above.
A Cookie is a text-only string of characters that is temporarily stored in your computer’s memory. Our Cookies are time-sensitive, and automatically expire. If the expiration of a Cookie is set to be longer than the time you spend on a site, then this text-only string is saved in a Cookie on your computer’s hard drive for future reference; otherwise it disappears from your computer when your browser is closed. The Cookies we use cannot retrieve information from your computer’s hard drive, cannot destroy files, and cannot send viruses to your computer. When a Cookie is placed on your computer’s hard drive, it does not allow access to your personal information, but it may be used to identify your computer. Stem uses Cookies to track the pages on our website that a user visits, so that information can be customized to the visitor for each session on our website, and so that future visits may be enhanced. This is a quick and convenient method of keeping our website’s content fresh and relevant to the website visitor. Most web browsers give you the ability to prevent your browser from accepting new Cookies, to have the browser notify you when you receive a new Cookie, and to disable Cookies entirely. You can still review our website if you set your browser to refuse all Cookies, but you must enable Cookies to register on our websites.
We contract with selected marketing specialist companies to help us track the effectiveness of our website. In conjunction with Cookies, we use Web Beacons and Javascript Tracking Codes to monitor web site traffic generated from various forms of advertising, or to track site traffic. A Web Beacon is a graphic on a web page designed to track pages viewed and messages opened. Web Beacons are often invisible, because they are generally only one pixel by one pixel in size. Javascript Tracking Codes are small fragments of application logic that measures aspects of web page interaction. When a user requests a Stem web page, the Web Beacon and/or Tracking Code is retrieved/activated. Once retrieved/activated, the Web Beacon and/or Tracking Code can pass along to our contracted marketing specialist companies’ information such as the IP address of the computer that requested the page, the time the page containing the Web Beacon and/or Tracking Code was viewed and for how long, and the type of browser that retrieved the page. This information is compiled by our marketing specialist companies and made available to us. Web Beacons and Tracking Codes, together with Cookies, enable us to enhance your experience on our websites and improve the effectiveness of our advertising. Our contracted marketing specialist companies are not permitted to use this information for any purpose other than the functions which they perform for us.
Stem uses industry standard efforts to safeguard the confidentiality of personally identifiable information, including data encryption, firewalls, and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). Of course, despite these efforts, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to keep your personally identifiable information safe from all threats under all circumstances.
We will not sell your personally identifiable information to others. Stem may disclose your personal information to its agents or sub-contractors solely for the purpose of obtaining their services, and the agent or sub-contractor in question will be obligated to use that personal information in accordance with the terms of this privacy statement. In addition to the disclosures reasonably necessary for the purposes identified elsewhere above, Stem may disclose your personal information to the extent that it is required to do so by law, in connection with any legal proceedings or prospective legal proceedings, in order to establish, exercise or defend its legal rights, and in the event of merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of Stem’s assets, in which personal information held by Stem about users of its services is among the assets transferred.
California law grants additional privacy rights to California residents. In particular, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) requires businesses to disclose, for the past 12 months,(i) the categories of personal information collected, (ii) the sources of the collected personal information, (iii) the purposes for which the collected personal information is used, (iv) the categories of personal information disclosed for a business purpose, and (v) the categories of any personal information sold. Stem provides these disclosures in the following table. (Note that Stem does not sell any personal information, even under the broad CCPA definition of a “sale.”)
| Category | Sources of Collection | Purposes of Collection | Disclosures for a Business Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Identifiers |
Website visits and customer applications |
For customer registration, to enable Stem’s services and to allow Stem to communicate with you |
To utilities, energy services companies and other service providers for the purpose of providing services to you or on Stem’s behalf |
|
Internet or other similar network activity |
Your browsing and search history on our website |
To improve the visitor experience on our website, diagnose server problems and administer our website |
To marketing specialist companies for the purpose of enhancing our website and improving the effectiveness of our advertising
|
California residents also have the rights described below. We will not discriminate against any California resident who exercises these rights.
Right to access/know. You may request from us a list of (i) the personal information that we have collected about you, and (ii) the categories of third parties to whom we have disclosed your personal information. You have the right to up to two (2) access requests each twelve (12) months.
Right to delete your personal information. You may request, at any time, that we delete your personal information.
You may contact us to exercise these rights at [email protected]. To ensure the privacy and protection of individuals, we are required to verify your identity or otherwise authenticate your request(s). Please note that, under the CCPA, we are not required to grant a request to access/know or a request to delete with respect to personal information obtained from you in your role as an employee, owner, director, officer or contractor of a company and within the context of Stem providing its services to such company.
We will occasionally update this privacy statement to reflect changes in our services and customer feedback. When we post changes to this statement, we will revise the “last updated” date at the top of this statement. If there are material changes to this statement or in how Stem will use your personal information, we will notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes prior to implementing the change or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to periodically review this statement to be informed of how Stem is protecting your information.
Your privacy is important to Stem. This privacy statement provides information about the personal information that Stem collects, and the ways in which Stem uses that personal information. Please feel free to email to [email protected] with any questions.
