Home >Virgin Media Television Privacy Policy

Virgin Media Television Privacy Policy

A.  We care about your privacy

Virgin Media Television Limited, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper, Dublin 1, (“Virgin Media Television”, “our”, “we” or “us”) is committed to protecting your privacy.

We want you to be confident in the knowledge that we treat your information with care and in accordance with our obligations under applicable data protection and privacy laws. This privacy policy (“Policy”) describes how we obtain and process your information when you use our services and when we provide you with our services.

This Policy applies to all individuals that provide their personal data to Virgin Media Television as well as visitors to or users of our websites or apps, or any person that engages with us such as by phone, text, post, email, social media or audience participation. 

When you use our services, your information will be handled as set out here in this Policy. While we may make changes to this Policy from time to time, we will publish any updated version of this Policy on our website, and we will take steps to inform you in advance of any material change that may affect the services that you have registered for.

 

B. Information we collect

As further explained below, we may combine this information even where it is collected in different ways.

 

C. How we use your information

1. To provide our services

We use your information so we can provide you with Virgin Media Television services. For example:

-        To set up, manage and administer your online account and provide access to our Apps

-        To bring you relevant and entertaining TV content and advertising

-        To make sure our services are working as they should be.

-        To respond quickly to your queries or issues.

-        To administer competitions you may enter.

Providing our services to you also involves performing the following activities which are necessary to make the service available to you such as technical and commercial support including providing service messages about our online services such as password reminders, to provide account administration and quality controls. We use IP addresses and device identifiers to determine you are accessing the services from Ireland as sometimes content is bought for Irish viewing only.

We may also use your information when asking for feedback in respect of the performance of our services such as requesting you to take part in surveys. This information helps us to understand which content and services are most interesting and enjoyable for our users and to ensure we are providing you with the best possible services.

We may also monitor and record our communications with you, including e-mails and phone conversations, for training purposes, quality assurance and to record details about the services you avail of from us. Please note that you need to be 16 or over to register for the Virgin Media Television Player service. You will be asked to confirm your age at the registration stage.

Legal basis for processing this information:

Legitimate interests

We will not request nor should you provide sensitive data (‘special categories’) in your interactions with us. If you voluntarily provide us with any information which includes any special categories of personal data (such as information about your health, race or religion), you must make sure before you provide this that you are happy for us to use that information for the purposes set out in this Policy.

2. To personalise your service and build your profile

TV recommendations:

If you register for the Virgin Media Player, you can get personal recommendations of what to watch next and download the episodes you want to save for later. Where you have registered an account with us, we use your information so we can offer you a personalised experience.

For example, when you watch something on Virgin Media Player through a registered account, we use that information to make recommendations of new shows to watch, based on what you've previously seen and favourited.

Legal basis for processing this information

Legitimate interest/consent

Personalised advertisements:

We may use your information to personalise the ads you see where you allow us to do so.

We work with advertisers to make sure the ads are as relevant to you as possible. When you register on the Virgin Media Player, we ask that you provide your age, email address, gender, county and Eircode (optional) as this allows us to tailor the ads that you see within your favourite shows. Virgin Media Television does not receive any television license revenue and relies on advertiser funding to continue providing top-quality entertainment shows for Irish viewers.

Trusted third party providers help us to present personalised advertisements or other content on our website and other websites that display Virgin Media Television advertisements.

In order to ensure that the most relevant type of advertising is presented to you while using our services, information can be analysed to allow Virgin Media Television to show a selection of advertisements to different viewers. We may use information we collect from you while using our services to choose which adverts you see. We may engage with trusted commerce partners to ensure that any advertisements presented to you are more useful and relevant. Sometimes this is based on Third Party Data that these companies provide to us. We may analyse your viewing information to provide you with suitable advertising.

Advertising network providers use cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies on your device to serve you advertisement or content tailored to interests you have shown by building an understanding of your internet browsing on the website and other websites you have visited. The use of cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies by our advertising network providers is subject to their own privacy policies, not Virgin Media Television’s Policy. For more information on how we use cookie type technologies and how you can manage them, please read our cookies policy found at the following link.

We may use Registration Details, Website Data, App Data Third Party Data and Personalisation Information, to personalise the TV content and ads you see on websites and Apps and to build an understanding of your interests and preferences.

You can manage your advertising choices by visiting our Preference Centre.

Legal basis for processing this information:

Legitimate interest/consent

3. Marketing

Email

Provided you agree to receive marketing information, we will use the email address you provide to us to send you email marketing (including our newsletter, information about new shows, rewards, personalised experiences and competitions). You can opt out of receiving marketing emails at any time in your account settings or by utilising the opt-out provided in the communication. If you opt out of email marketing, we will still need to send you service communications by email from time to time, such as information about changes to our services.

Provided you agree to receive marketing information from us by the means you have chosen, we will continue to send you information about our services until you opt out.

Legal basis for processing this information:

Consent

Push notifications

If you download our apps, certain communications may be sent by push notifications to your device. Push notifications are messages that pop up on your mobile device. You can manage your push notification preferences in your device settings. Please note, disabling push notifications does not change your Virgin Media Television marketing preferences.

4. To meet our legal obligations

We may be required by law to retain or disclose your information to competent authorities, including law enforcement agencies.

Legal basis for processing this information:

Compliance with a legal obligation, or where in our, your or others’ legitimate interests or vital interests, or in the public interest.

5. For Statistics

We perform statistical analyses of user behaviour, in order to measure interest in the various sections of our websites, content viewed and advertisements presented to improve design, navigation and to insight of content and advertisement performance.


We may use depersonalised and aggregated information to develop reports and analysis about what types of content and or advertisements are watched or skipped, for research and for other legitimate business purposes. We combine your information, in aggregated form, with those of other users to generate summarised reports that help us to optimise our services and programming, and can also help other entities, like advertisers, better plan their activity. This information will allow us, for example, to make better decisions about the content we make available and to ultimately improve our services.


We use your Registration Details, Website Data, App Data, Service Data, Third Party Data and Personalisation Information Data for these statistical purposes.


The Virgin Media Player includes third party measurement software that allows users to contribute to market research with anonymous data. Further information is available here.

Legal basis for processing this information:  

Legitimate interest.

 

D. How do we protect your information?

We work very hard to protect your privacy and have taken key steps in protecting it. We have formally appointed individuals who are responsible for the security of our information systems.

We have implemented solutions to protect your information, which consist of a variety of both technical and policy based solutions which vary depending on the applicable service or product offered or provided to you. These solutions may include, but are not limited to, password protection, encryption, firewalls, anti-virus, intrusion detection, anomaly detection and access controls for our employees.

 

E. Lawful basis for processing:

To use your information lawfully we rely on one or more of the following legal bases:

-      Performance of a contract;

-      Legal obligation;

-      Our legitimate interests;

-      Your consent (where you have provided it);

-      Protecting the vital interests of you and others; and

-      Public Interest.

To help you better understand where these legal bases apply we have set out for you some examples of each lawful bases at various point throughout this policy, for example at Section C “How we use your information” we clarify that your information is used for legitimate interests in some cases, using your consent for email marketing and for legitimate interest purposes in the case of statistical purposes. Where we rely on your consent to process your information, you have the right to withdraw or decline your consent at any time.

 

F. Data Retention:

We retain your information in accordance with our record retention policy. This policy operates on the basis that we only retain information for as long as is necessary and in accordance with any legal requirements that we are required to meet.

Where applicable and in order to offer you information on our services, we collect and store certain information for so long as you remain a registered user of the Virgin Media Player. You can of contact us at any time as set out in the ‘Your rights’ section of this Policy.

We retain your information even after you have stopped receiving services from us if reasonably necessary to comply with our legal obligations, meet regulatory requirements, resolve disputes, maintain security, prevent fraud and abuse, enforce our terms and conditions of service, or fulfil your request to “unsubscribe” from further messages from us. We may retain anonymised information after your account has been closed. 

If your account is inactive, we will delete your account in line with our retention policy.

 

G. Confidentiality of your information

We will keep your information confidential except where disclosure is required or permitted by law for example to government bodies and law enforcement agencies.

 

H. Sharing your information

We rely on trusted third parties to help us run our business and to provide us with specialised services. We may share your information with the following third parties:

IT service providers:

We work with IT service providers to deliver and maintain our service. This includes cloud computing providers, data storage providers and software providers.

Service Providers:

We work with service delivery partners to deliver our service including delivering content on Virgin Media Player.

Advertising Service Providers: 

We share data with trusted third-party advertising service providers to help us to present personalised advertisements or other content as outlined in Section 2 of this notice.

Analytics Service Providers:

We use third party analytics services to help understand your usage of our services. For further information, please see section 5 above. 

Other third parties:

We may also use legal advisors, accountants and consultants and we may share your information with them for legitimate business purposes.

Regulators – in certain circumstances we are required to provide your information to a regulator or other statutory bodies (e.g. in the investigation of complaints).

Group Companies – Virgin Media Television is part of Liberty Global Group. We may share your information with companies within the Liberty Global Group, with our parent company, subsidiaries, or other companies under common control (collectively "Affiliates"), for the operation of services or a purchaser of our business. We will require our Affiliates or any purchaser to honour this Policy where we share your information with them.

We require all of the above third parties to keep your information confidential and secure and use it solely for the purpose of providing the specified services to us.

Transfers outside the European Economic Area (EEA)

Some third parties may be located in countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA). The EEA includes European Union countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. If Virgin Media Television transfer data outside of the EEA, we ensure dedicated safeguards are established, including contractual and technical safeguards to ensure your information is protected in line with data protection laws. For example, transfers may take place using Standard Contractual Clauses.

 

I. Your rights

Here we set out your rights in relation to how we use your information. You can exercise these rights by submitting a request by contacting the Data Protection Officer Virgin Media Television Limited, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper, Dublin 1 or by completing the Data Protection Officer from here. While some of these rights apply generally, certain rights apply only in certain limited cases.

Withdraw your consent:

Where you have given your consent to any of the uses of your information mentioned you can withdraw your consent at any time. If you withdraw your consent to the use or sharing of your information for purposes set out in this Policy, you may not have access to all (or any) of our products or services and we might not be able to provide you all (or any) of the products or services under this Policy. In certain cases, we may continue to process your information after you have withdrawn consent if we have a legal basis to do so or if your withdrawal of consent was limited to certain processing activities.

Access your information:

You can request a copy of the information that we hold about you. Please note, Virgin Media Television may no longer have a copy of the information you are requesting due to our data retention and deletion protocols.

Rectify your information:

If the information we hold about you is inaccurate or incomplete you can request a rectification.

Erase your information:

You have the right to request that your information is deleted when there's no compelling reason for us to keep it.

Portability:

You can request that the information you provided to us be returned to you in a commonly used machine readable format, or, if you wish, directly transferred to another provider.

Restriction of processing:

You can request restriction of processing for the following cases (please state which case you are in when making your request):

-      If you are contesting the accuracy of your information;

-      If you believe that we shouldn’t be processing your information, but you don’t want us to erase it;

-      If we no longer need the information but you need it for the instigation or defence of a legal claim;

-      If you have objected to the processing and we are in the process of verifying whether we have legitimate grounds to keep processing the information.

-      You can choose not to be notified of our latest offers.

Automated decisions including profiling:

You have the right to ask for any automated decision, including profiling, to be manually assessed by a person in certain circumstances.

 

J. How can you contact us about this Policy?

The controller of your information is Virgin Media Television Limited having its registered office at Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper, Dublin 1, Ireland.

Data Protection Officer (DPO): You can address any question, comment or request regarding your information to our Data Protection Officer by post to the address provided above.

Data Supervisory Authority: In case you’re not satisfied with the response we give you, you can also lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority such as the Office of the Data Protection Commission:

Data Protection Commission

21 Fitzwilliam Square South

Dublin 2

EirCode D02 RD28

Telephone: +353 01 7650100

 

This Privacy Policy was last updated on 08 April 2024