We take your privacy seriously and we want you to know why and how we collect, use, share, and protect your information.

What information we collect

We respect the right to privacy of all visitors to the Rochester Public Utilities (RPU) site. We do not collect information that would personally identify you without your consent. The personal information that you submit, such as on the contact us form or sign up for Service Assured®, is shared only with those who need this information to respond to your request and we will utilize the information to improve operations. Information submitted through online forms may be collected to ensure quality of service.

Email communications, newsletter and related services

Rochester Public Utilities provides you with the opportunity to receive communications from us or third parties. You can unsubscribe from the RPU newsletter RPU Plugged In at anytime via contact us or by calling RPU.

Email communications that you send to us via the contact and email links on our site may be shared with any member of our team and will be directed to the appropriate person most able to address your message. We make every effort to respond in a timely fashion once communications are received. Once we have responded to your communication, it is discarded or archived, depending on the nature of the message.

Email does not provide a completely secure and confidential means of communication. If you wish to keep your communication private call 1-800-778-3421.

You may decide at some point that you no longer wish to receive communications from our site. To stop receiving communications, send an email message to customerservice@rpu.org noting that you no longer wish to receive communication from us.

Surveys

RPU, from time to time, surveys visitors to our site. The information is used in an aggregated, de-identified form to help us understand the needs of our visitors so that we can improve our visitor experience. The information may be shared with third parties with whom we have a business relationship. We generally do not ask for information in the surveys that would personally identify you. If we do request contact information for follow-up, you may decline to provide it. If survey respondents provide personal information, it is shared only with those people who need to see it to respond to the question or request, or with third parties who perform data management services for our site. Those third parties have agreed to keep all data from surveys confidential.

IP addresses

The web server may automatically collect the Internet Protocol (IP) address of when your computer accesses Rochester Public Utilities’ web based services. An IP address is a number that is assigned to your computer when you access the Internet. This information may be used in aggregate form to better understand our customers and to ensure and improve the quality of our service.

Cookies and other tracking technology

We collect information about visitors to our site using "cookies" and similar technology such as event tracking, pixel tags, visitor usage recordings and so on. We use this technology to recognize a repeat visitor. We use session cookies to track a visitor's path through our site during a visit, to help us understand how people use our site and interact with us in order for us to continually improve our visitor experience.

How we use the information we collect

We use the information we collect for things like:

  • Fulfilling requests for services or information
  • Marketing and advertising products and services
  • Conducting research and analysis
  • Communicating things like special events and surveys
  • Establishing and managing your account with us
  • Identifying you on our websites and tailoring advertisements and offers to you (both on our websites and on other websites) based on your interactions with us in person and online
  • Operating, evaluating and improving our business and website

Data retention

We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.

Except as permitted or required by Minnesota or federal law, we will not share any RPU customer data with any parties outside of Rochester Public Utilities.

We may share some information to third parties

We may share your personally identifiable information with third parties who we have engaged to help us provide you services. In each case, we will ensure that these third parties have agreed not to use or disclose your personal information except to help us provide the services.

Except as noted above for newsletters and surveys, Rochester Public Utilities does not provide any third party access to your IP address and email address.

We may provide third parties with aggregate statistics about our visitors, traffic and related site information. This data reflects site-usage patterns gathered during visits to our website each month, but they do not contain behavioral or identifying information about any individual member unless that member has given us permission to share that information.

To help us determine the effectiveness of our advertising, we work with Web analytics tools hosted by third parties who receive non-identifiable information from your browser, including but not limited to the site or the advertisement you came from, your IP address, your general geographic location, your browser and platform information, and the pages you view within our site.

Ads by Google

Note that Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site. Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our site users based on their visit to our site and other sites on the Internet. No personally identifiable information is collected as part of Google's process. Users may opt out of the use of this DART cookie by visiting Google's privacy document.

If you would like more information about these practices and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, visit the Network Advertising Initiative site. Some ad servers allow you to opt out of anonymous data collection through the use of cookies. To do so, you must opt out of such data collection with each individual site. You can opt out of cookies for several ad servers by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative gateway opt-out site. At that site you can also review the privacy policies of those ad servers.

Protecting your privacy

Whether you are visiting the Rochester Public Utilities site or working with one of our team members, we use reasonable security measures to protect the confidentiality of personal information under our control and appropriately limit access to it. Rochester Public Utilities cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. We have taken reasonable steps to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the personal information that you may provide. You should understand, however, that electronic transmissions via the Internet are not necessarily secure from interception, and so we cannot 100% guarantee the security or confidentiality of such transmissions.

If you reached this site via an ad from Rochester Public Utilities

If you come to a Rochester Public Utilities website via a Rochester Public Utilities advertisement, the ad may have been served to you based on your interests or selected for you based on your browsing activities.

Protecting children's privacy

We are committed to protecting children's privacy on the Internet, and we do not knowingly collect any personal information from children.

Links to other websites

Our websites link to electric and/or water industry websites, many of which have their own privacy policies. Be sure to review the privacy policy on the site you're visiting.

Privacy policy updates

We may need to update our privacy policy as technology changes and Rochester Public Utilities evolves. If we make significant changes to this privacy policy, we'll update it here.

Contact information

Rochester Public Utilities (RPU)
Customer Care
4000 East River Road NE,
Rochester, MN, 55906

This policy was last updated in September 2016.