The Jouli Data Ethics Charter.
How Jouli handles your data — written as binding promises, not fine print. The advice is free and never for sale; we never sell you, only the average.
1Our five promises, in one place
Everything in this Charter comes down to five promises. They bind us — not aspirations, not marketing.
- The advice is free, forever — and never for sale. We earn nothing from any switch, and no company can pay to change what Jouli tells you (even “don't buy / not yet”).
- We never sell you. We publish the average. Never your bill, quote, or home as an individual — even de-identified. We sell the aggregate benchmark, never the person — and never to your own retailer to use against you.
- You're pooled with at least 10 other homes — or you're not counted. Every published figure mixes you with at least 11 households at state or country level; anything rarer is deleted, not risked. Never your street or postcode.
- Contributing is opt-in, itemised, and reversible — and never required for an answer. Nothing joins an index unless you switch it on by category; switch off and your past contributions drop from every future update. We never infer or sell what you can't afford, your health, or who's home.
- We grade ourselves in public, and the advice and the data are walled apart by design. When Jouli predicts a saving we re-read your real bill and publish whether we were right — including our misses. The part that advises you cannot see the part that builds the indices.
2Free advice never needs your data
Jouli's whole job is to give you the honest move — including “don't buy”, “not yet”, or “go with someone else”. That advice is free, forever, and works fully with data-sharing switched off. You never have to share, contribute, or consent to anything to get a straight answer.
When you choose to add your own numbers — say, what you actually paid — Jouli can unlock the matching benchmark band for you in the same turn. That's a fair value-exchange, not a wall in front of advice. Bill Doctor's verdict, your incentives, and your roadmap answer fully whether or not you contribute. We will never word a screen to imply “tell us what you paid to get good advice.”
3We never sell you — only the k-anonymous aggregate
We do not sell, license, or hand over your individual data — not your bill, not your quote, not your home — to anyone, even de-identified, and even if it would be lucrative. Pseudonymised is not anonymous, and energy data can be re-identifiable, so we don't take the risk.
What we may publish or sell is the aggregate benchmark: the k-anonymous average of what households actually pay and were actually quoted, at state or country level. We sell the average, never the person. And we will never sell data back to your own retailer to use against you (churn or loyalty-tax signals) — that would arm the very party we tell you to leave.
4You're pooled with at least 10 other homes — or you're not counted
Every figure we publish mixes you with at least 11 households. Our index builds run a hard k-anonymity gate: if any cell would describe fewer than that, the cell is suppressed — the build aborts rather than ship it. We suppress rare combinations too (for example, the only large battery in a small area), because rarity is how people get re-identified.
Geography stops at state or country level. We do not publish at postcode or street level — the postcode field is blocked in our code, not just in policy. If your situation is so unusual that even a state-level pool can't hide you, you are dropped, not risked.
5Contributing is opt-in, itemised, and reversible
Nothing about you joins a data product unless you switch it on. The default is OFF. Consent is itemised — you turn on the categories you're comfortable with, one at a time, never one bundled tick — and it is one-tap reversible. When you switch a category off, your past contributions drop out of every future index update.
Paying us does not auto-consent you to anything: your tier and your data toggles are independent. And we will never infer or sell sensitive things about you — what you can't afford, your financial distress, your health, or who's home. Where we listen to why households stall on electrifying (for example, “the landlord won't allow it”), it is only ever counted in the aggregate, never tied to you.
6Advice is walled apart from the data business
The part of Jouli that advises you and the part that builds the benchmarks are separated by design — different systems, different rules. The advice engine cannot be tuned by, or for, the data business. This separation is the whole point: it is what makes the data ethically usable, because no buyer and no commercial interest can ever bias a “don't buy / not yet” recommendation.
If we are ever unable to keep that wall standing for a given product, we don't ship the product.
7We grade ourselves in public
When Jouli predicts a saving, we don't let it disappear. With your permission we re-read your real bill on the next cycle and publish whether we were right — including the times we were wrong. A company that grades itself in public, misses and all, is the opposite of a broker hiding its incentives. Holding ourselves to the result is how we earn the trust that the rest of this Charter rests on.
8The lines we will never cross
To make the promises above concrete, here is what we have ruled out — permanently:
- We will never sell or license individual or per-household data, even pseudonymised.
- We will never sell data back to your own retailer to use against you.
- We will never allow rare-combination or small-cell re-identification.
- We will never use dark-pattern, bundled, pre-ticked, or advice-gated consent.
- We will never sell sensitive inferences — affordability, distress, health, or occupancy.
- We will never re-identify anyone, or contract with anyone who reserves the right to.
- We will never sell smart-meter or Consumer Data Right (CDR) data without specialist legal sign-off; until then it is ring-fenced and physically excluded from anything we publish or sell.
9Who watches this — and what changes
A named Data Steward inside Mission Green has the authority to block any data release that would breach this Charter, and signs off the privacy checks before any benchmark is published. De-identification is treated as an ongoing, owned process with a cadence — not a one-time scrub.
We may update this Charter as Jouli evolves or the law changes. When we do, we'll update the date at the top. We will not weaken a promise quietly: if a change would reduce your protection, we'll make that change clear rather than bury it.
10Contact
Questions about how we handle data, or want to exercise your choices? Email us at hello@missiongreen.com.au, or read the formal detail in our Privacy Policy. Jouli is operated by Mission Green Pty Ltd, Australia.