We Are Committed to Protecting Your Privacy

MCE is committed to maintaining strong and meaningful privacy protections for our customers. Our privacy policy is designed to inform you about the information we collect, how we use it, and how we protect it.

Customer Confidentiality Policy

MCE will maintain the confidentiality of individual customers’ names, service addresses, billing addresses, telephone numbers, account numbers, and electricity consumption, except where reasonably necessary to conduct MCE’s business or to provide services to customers, including but not limited to where such disclosure is necessary to (a) comply with the law or regulations; (b) enable MCE to provide service to its customers; (c) collect unpaid bills; (d) obtain and provide credit reporting information; or (e) resolve customer disputes or inquiries. MCE will not disclose customer information for telemarketing, email, or direct mail solicitation. Aggregate data may be released at MCE’s discretion. MCE will handle customer energy usage information in a manner that is fully compliant with the California Public Utility Commission’s required privacy protections for customers of Community Choice Aggregators defined in Decision 12-08-045.

Notice of Accessing, Collecting, Storing, Using and Disclosing Energy Usage Information

MCE’s Privacy Policy and Notice of Accessing, Collecting, Storing, Using and Disclosing Energy Usage Information applies to MCE, its employees, agents, contractors and affiliates, and is effective November 12, 2012. We treat all customer information as confidential, consistent with legal and regulatory requirements, and employ a combination of technology and standard practices to ensure your information is safeguarded from unauthorized access or exposure.

To standardize some of the rules regarding customer privacy, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued “Rules Regarding Privacy and Security Protections for Energy Usage Data”. These rules prohibit MCE and other load-serving entities from releasing information that can reasonably be used to identify an individual customer, or a customer’s family, household or residence, to a third party without the customer’s written consent, except as is necessary for MCE to:

  • Provide or bill for electrical power services;
  • Provide services required by state or federal law or as specifically authorized by an order of the CPUC;
  • Plan, implement or evaluate energy management, demand response or energy efficiency programs under contract with MCE or under contract with the CPUC;
  • Provide personal information pursuant to a lawful warrant or court or law enforcement order, after prior notice to you unless such notice is prohibited by law; or
  • Provide personal information to emergency responders in situations involving an imminent threat to life or property.

For additional privacy information, please contact MCE’s Customer Operations Team at info@mceCleanEnergy.org or 1 (888) 632-3674.

Website Security

Your visits to MCE’s website. We collect information about our website, such as the number of visitors to the website and the number of users that click on certain links or use certain services. For some applications, such as rate analysis, we link usage information with the customer visiting the website. We use industry standard software to create summary statistics of the usage data we collect, which may then be used to highlight what our visitors find interesting, to improve the website design and usability, to identify system performance issues, or for other internal purposes.

Our Use of Your IP Address. An Internet Protocol (“IP”) address is a number automatically assigned to your computer every time you browse the Internet. When you visit the website, our servers log your current IP address. We may use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our servers and to administer the website. Your IP address is not tied to your personal information and we do not use it to identify you when logging IP address data except to provide content to you.

Our Use of Cookies. When you visit the website, our server may create cookies, which are small files placed on your computer, making it easier for you to use the website by verifying when you travel from page to page. The data we collect on website usage from cookies is not tied to your personal information and we only use it in a collective form. We do not sell or transfer the data we obtain from cookies for any purpose other than to evaluate website usage or provide utility services to you, or to contact you to offer programs and/or services that you may be interested in.

Installed Plug-ins. MCE has installed WP DoNotTrack .This stops plugins and themes from adding 3rd party tracking code and cookies protecting visitor’s privacy, security and offering performance gains (limiting requests executed in the browser to render your pages). Additionally, Third Party Eraser Tool removes all the occurrences of third-party embed inside posts, pages, and widgets.

MCE’s website uses an analytical tracking service called Lucky Orange to improve its website functionality and user experience. If at any time you do not want your mouse movements, clicks, or scrolling activity tracked while visiting MCE’s website, please visit luckyorange.com/privacy.

How does it work?

  • It stops images or javascript from being loaded.
  • It sets a2a_config.no_3p to true for add-to-any NOT to execute the 3rd party tracking.

Links
While browsing the website, you may encounter and choose to access other third-party operated websites or online services through hypertext links. These third-party websites may send their own cookies to you, log your IP address, and otherwise collect data or personal information about you and your online activities. MCE does not control and is not responsible for what third parties do in connection with their websites or online services, or how they handle your personal information. Please use caution and consult the privacy policies posted on each third-party website for further information.

Security
Once you login to MCE’s online services, any account information you enter (or that is displayed on our website in your browser window) is secured using an industry standard security technology known as Secure Sockets Layer (“SSL”). By using SSL, we attempt to protect the confidentiality of your personal and financial information. Your browser must be capable of supporting SSL. Please check with your browser manufacturer for details.

Privacy Policy & Website Security FAQ

We collect customer information, such as your electric usage, name, address, and account information, based on your use of electric services and your decision to participate in programs we offer such as those related to energy efficiency.

PG&E provides customer information to MCE. When you use electricity service, usage data is collected via PG&E’s metering systems (including the SmartMeter system).

In order to provide greater security for you on MCE’s website, you may be asked to submit personal information such as your MCE account number, your PG&E account number, name, address, phone number and email address. You may also be asked to submit additional personal information or financial information in order to use certain specific services. Our goal is to protect all information you provide us on the website, as set forth in this Privacy Policy. To that end, we have provided 128 bit encryption on this website with an SSL certificate.

Other than for the exceptions noted in the above section, it is MCE’s policy to not release personal information about you to any other person or business entity without your prior written consent. Written consent may be obtained electronically. We encourage you to protect the confidentiality of your user name and password and other personally identifiable information that you access on MCE’s website.

You are responsible for your use of MCE’s website; therefore please use your own good judgment when choosing to share your user name or password with anyone who could use it to access your personal information without your permission.

We use customer information to administer your account and inform you about your energy usage, as well as to manage, provide, and improve our services and business operations including data management and customer service.

We use this information to generate the MCE charges on your customer billing statement and to communicate with you about specific programs or opportunities offered by MCE that may help you to lower your energy usage or realize other benefits. We may also aggregate data about your electric usage with other users in various formats so that the data becomes anonymous and cannot be identified directly with you.

For instance, aggregated data could be a summary of total energy usage for all homes and businesses in a certain geographic area or climate. Aggregated data is not subject to privacy restrictions and is used by us to manage, provide, and improve our services and business operations.

We ask you to provide personal information when you access customer services offered on the website, and that information enables us to provide you with better service. We may use this information to contact you to respond to an inquiry that you send to MCE or to keep you informed about MCE and its services. If you choose email as an approved method for communicating with us, then we will generally use your email to communicate with you.

In order to provide you with services offered on our website, or to complete transactions requested by you on the website, we may transfer you to outside services provided by third-party operators. In certain instances, the third-party content may be shown in such a way that it appears that you are still on MCE’s website. In such cases, we will have agreements with those third parties where they agree to maintain the confidentiality of your personal information and to use it only to help us serve you.

Other than for the exceptions noted in the above section, it is MCE’s policy to not release personal information about you to any other person or business entity without your prior written consent. Written consent may be obtained electronically.

MCE may share customer data with contractors and vendors for purposes of providing you services and operating our programs. In these cases, we require that the contractors or vendors agree to only use customer data for program operational purposes and to protect it under the same confidentiality and privacy standards that we apply to our own employees and operations. MCE does not release personal customer information for any other reason without your prior written consent, except as described below. MCE does not sell or provide personal customer information to third parties for their commercial benefit. MCE may release personal information without your prior written consent as follows:

  • To law enforcement officers, pursuant to legal process (such as a warrant or subpoena approved by a judge);
  • To contractors providing utility-related services on behalf of MCE—but only to the extent necessary to render the service and subject to confidentiality and security obligations;
  • To the CPUC (or other governmental agencies with jurisdiction over PG&E) when they require such information;
  • To others as required by court order or by applicable laws, rules, or regulations governing PG&E;
  • To credit reporting agencies and collection agencies if your account is assigned for collection; and
  • To emergency responders in situations of imminent threat to life or property.
MCE maintains customer-specific energy usage and billing information for only as long as is reasonably necessary, typically not more than five years unless otherwise necessitated by law or regulation. As a general policy, we collect and retain personal information in minimal quantities and for limited periods of time such that are reasonably necessary to provide electric services to you.

We will notify you annually with an on-bill message to guide you to the most updated version of this Privacy Policy, made available on our website. Between these notification periods, we will also notify you of any changes to this Privacy Policy through communications on our website, www.mceCleanEnergy.org, including how to obtain prior versions of this Privacy Policy upon request.

If you have questions, concerns, or would like to view your disclosed information, please contact our Customer Operations Team at: 

info@mceCleanEnergy.org
1 (888) 632-3674

MCE Customer Operations Team
1125 Tamalpais Avenue
San Rafael, CA 94901

We share our customers’ concern that children’s privacy is important. We have areas of our website intended for the use of children containing information about energy and safety. We also provide free classroom materials for teachers on energy awareness and safety. We do not monitor the age of users of the website. However, if you are under the age of 18, you should not submit personal information on the website or any websites without the consent of your parent or guardian.