The personal information that you provide when you apply for a Vodafone airtime agreement ie your name, address and date of birth will be used to carry out a credit check with licensed credit reference agencies, and to verify your identity. This is to protect you from identity theft and Vodafone from fraudulent credit applications.

Information held about you by the credit reference agencies may already be linked to or associated with records relating to one or more of your partners where you have associated or joint financial arrangements. When you apply for an airtime agreement, Vodafone will assess your application with reference to any such linked or “associated” records. You may only decline a linked or associated search, but only if you declare that such a financial link does not have any adverse effect on your application. We will check the validity of your declaration with the credit reference agencies and if we discover any associated records, which would affect the accuracy of this declaration we may decide not to proceed with the application on this basis. If you wish to proceed on that basis please contact our Credit Assessment department who will carry out a manual review instead.

We will use credit scoring and/or automated decision making systems when assessing your application. If you are turned down for an airtime agreement, please contact our Data Protection Manager with information about the date and time of your application, the store where you applied, and any other information that you think may assist your application to be reviewed.

During the lifetime of your airtime agreement with us, we will disclose details account and billing information to the credit reference agencies such as change of address, the payments you made, account balances, any payment default, dispute, queries and debts. This information will be retained by the credit reference agencies, and may be used by us and other organisations to help make decisions about other credit applications made by you or other members of your household with whom you are linked financially.

We will also share your details with fraud and theft prevention agencies to protect you and us from fraud and theft. Information supplied to these fraud prevention agencies may result in a warning marker being placed against the address or addresses used in any applications and this will be accessible to other members of those fraud prevention agencies. A warning marker means that Vodafone and other members of these fraud prevention agencies should take extra precautions to ensure that personal and address information is genuine – this helps to protect an address from any further misuse.

Information held by fraud prevention agencies may also be shared with other organisations to help them make decisions on motor, household, credit, life and other insurance proposals and insurance claims, for you and members of your household.

Any information we hold about your account will also be used for debt tracing and claims assessments. In the event that you do not repay in full and on time, we may tell credit reference agencies who will record the outstanding debt.

If you do not become a customer of Vodafone Limited we will continue to hold information about you for customer enquiries, complying with any legal obligation and for the prevention and detection of fraud.

If your application is declined following a credit check and because of information held by the below credit reference agencies used by Vodafone Limited, you can request a copy of your credit reference file by writing to:

Experian Limited
Consumer Help Service,
PO Box 8000,
Nottingham
NG1 5GX.
Tel: 0870 416212

• www.experian.co.uk

Equifax PLC
Credit File Advice Centre
PO Box 1140
Bradford
BD1 5US.
Tel: 08705-143-700

• www.econsumer.equifax.co.uk

Please note that these credit reference agencies will charge a fee to provide you with a copy of your credit reference record. The fee will depend on the level of detail that you request. More information is given on the websites referred to above.