Centrica and cookies

Your trust, privacy and data are important to us and we are committed to being transparent about our data practices and how we use and protect your data.

This notice provides more detail about the cookies and tracking technologies we use and should be read in conjunction with the information in our cookie preference centre where you can adjust your cookie settings.

There is also information on how to contact Centrica’s privacy team.

Types of cookies and tracking technologies

Strictly necessary cookies

Who sets the cookie and what is done with the information

British Gas
Maintain your session across pages, and user preferences. 

AWIN
Determine whether you are due a cashback or reward, pay affiliates for sales if you came through an affiliate site.

Performance cookies

Google
We use Google to provide statistical counting of users, paths, pages visited and so on. We use information such as your IP address, browser type, unique identifiers, and product holding information, stored in cookies on your device to record how you interact with our website. We do this to understand how our customers use our site, how we can design it to serve them better, and where our customers come from, including marketing campaigns, all of which are crucial in providing a better service for our customers.

Adobe
We use Adobe to provide statistical counting of users, paths, pages visited and so on. We use information such as your IP address, browser type, unique identifiers, and product holding information, stored in cookies on your device to record how you interact with our website. We do this to understand how our customers use our site, how we can design it to serve them better, and where our customers come from, including marketing campaigns, all of which are crucial in providing a better service for our customers. We also use Adobe Test and Target to help measure the performance of different versions of web pages.

Response tap
We link website visitor behaviour to telephone calls made to us as the result of a visit, in order to understand the effectiveness of the website in encouraging calls from customers.

Inspectlet
Inspectlet analyse the user behaviour of visitors to this website and provide research information designed to improve the customer experience.

Wingify
The tool (Visual Website optimiser) helps site owners measure the performance of different versions of web pages.

AppDynamics
We use AppDynamics to understand if there are errors or load issues in our website or app so we can identify and fix any issues as quickly as possible. It does not capture any information about you other than IP address.

SurveyMonkey
Third party cookies associated with this domain are usually related to survey and questionnaire functionality in a website.

Decibel insights
We use Decibel to see how you interact with pages on our website. Decibel records how you use our site, including which buttons you click, how long you spend entering text, and the like, so we can see how customers actually use the site. It does not capture any information about who you are, or the detail of what you are doing on the website.

Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a service that is used for website analysis and A/B testing.

Functional cookies

Qryz
Qryz provides a survey tool allowing us to elicit responses from our customers to questions we want to ask.

MediaCom
MediaCom is our advertising agency who conduct ad campaigns on our behalf.

New Relic
New Relic provides a platform for monitoring the performance of web and mobile applications.

Flashtalking
Flashtalking applies both cookie-based and cookie-less technologies to identify devices facilitating the management, delivery and measuring of all forms of digital advertising across desktop, tablet and mobile. Learn more about Flashtalking's use of data and your choices in their Consumer Privacy statement.

Targeting cookies

Infinity tracking
Infinity Tracking Ltd provide visitor phone call tracking to optimise targeted marketing and link inbound calls to marketing activity.

Google
Although Google is primarily known as a search engine, the company provides a diverse range of products and services. Its main source of revenue however is advertising. Google tracks users extensively both through its own products and sites, and the numerous technologies embedded into many millions of websites around the world. It uses the data gathered from most of these services to profile the interests of web users and sell advertising space to organisations based on such interest profiles as well as aligning adverts to the content on the pages where its customers’ adverts appear.

Quantcast
Quantcast is a digital advertising company. They provide website rankings, and the data they collect is also used for audience segmentation and targeted advertising.

Facebook
We allow Facebook to place cookies on web browsers. When a British Gas user goes to Facebook, Facebook can then serve them targeted, personalised advertising from British Gas. It also delivers behaviourally targeted advertising on other websites, similar to most dedicated online marketing companies.

Youtube
YouTube collects user data through videos embedded in websites, which is aggregated with profile data from other Google services in order to display targeted advertising to web visitors across a broad range of their own and other websites.

The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk is an online advertising marketplace.

tapad
Tapad provides technology to track users across devices to enhance targeting capabilities.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn's marketing services enable website owners to gain insight into the types of users on their site based on LinkedIn profile data, to improve targeting of advertising.

Flashtalking
Flashtalking facilitates the management, delivery and measuring of all forms of digital advertising across desktop, tablet and mobile.

AddThis
AddThis provides web widgets that site owners embed into their pages or other content, to enable visitors to create and share links to the content across social networks. They also make use of the data collected to provide advertisers and marketers with profile information for targeted, behavioural advertising.

Twitter
Twitter collects data through a range of plug-ins and integrations that is primarily used for ad tracking and targeting.

AppNexus
AppNexus provides a range of online advertising technology and services.

Pardot
Pardot is a marketing automation platform which provides lead generation services to businesses.

Yahoo
Allows targeting and personalization on the yahoo ad network.

Everesttech
A third-party cookie that stores user engagements with ads.

Microsoft Bing
Similar to how we work with Google we send data to Bing to determine what ads should be shown that may be relevant to the end user perusing the site.

Amazon
These are linked to Amazon’s affiliate marketing programme.

Exelate
Exelate is used for audio tracking and uses listener a ID to match online radio listeners to site conversion.

Pinterest
We work with Pinterest to make our Pinterest ads more effective by being able to retarget those that have already visited our website and create lookalike audiences.

Email and tracking technologies

To help us understand how recipients engage with our email correspondence, and how we can optimise our email for different devices (e.g. by identifying what kind of devices our customers use), we use an industry-standard approach of including an invisible image pixel in our emails. All our analytics activity using pixels focusses on broad trends, and we do not use pixels for anything relating to you individually.

Different devices and operating systems offer different levels of control over pixels, including the ability to switch off the automatic loading of remote images such as our pixels.

You can contact Centrica’s data protection officer by writing to:

The Data Protection Officer, Centrica Plc,
Millstream,
Maidenhead Road,
Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 5GD.

You can also contact our data protection officer at privacy@centrica.com.

Rewards trial

The following information relates to use of cookies for our Rewards trial platform.

Strictly necessary cookies

Who sets the cookie and what is done with the information

OneTrust
This cookie is set by the cookie compliance solution from OneTrust. It stores information about the categories of cookies the site uses and whether visitors have given or withdrawn consent for the use of each category. This enables site owners to prevent cookies in each category from being set in the users browser, when consent is not given. The cookie has a normal lifespan of one year, so that returning visitors to the site will have their preferences remembered. It contains no information that can identify the site visitor.

Google
The cookie provides scam protection.

It is dropped during the registration  only. The cookie ensures the form is filled by a human instead of a bot (as it provides a checkbox and images to verify to confirm it’s a human action). It is a necessary cookie dropped for ReCAPTCHA and without it, ReCAPTCHA wouldnt function therefore allow the member to complete their registration

Capillary Technologies Europe Limited
Enable service-related functionality, including offers, cashback-related services, and registration flow.

Functional cookies

AWS
These cookies enable us to allocate server traffic to make the user experience as smooth as possible. A so-called load balancer is used to determine which server currently has the best availability. The cookie binds a user session to a specific load balancer which ensures  all requests from a user during a session, is sent to the same target which improves experience to clients

This cookie is dropped during the registration process.

Targeting cookies

Matomo
Used to store details about the user such as the unique visitor ID. Short lived cookies are used to temporarily store data for the visit.