Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

We collect information that can identify you as an individual ("Personal Information") through various means:

2. How We Use Your Information

We use the collected information for the following purposes:

• To Provide Services: To respond to your requests for quotes, services, and support, and to fulfil our contractual obligations (e.g., providing websites, e-commerce stores, client portals, booking systems, or custom web applications).
• Communication: To communicate with you about your enquiry, your account, invoices and service updates. We don't send marketing emails.
• Improvement and Development: To analyze website usage, troubleshoot problems, customize the user experience, and improve our services, features, and website technology.
• Security and Fraud Prevention: To protect our website, business, and clients from fraud, security threats, and other illegal activities.
• Legal Compliance: To comply with applicable laws, regulations, and legal processes, including South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). For clients, tax and company law (the Tax Administration Act and the Companies Act) requires us to keep invoices and payment records.

3. Disclosure of Your Information

We do not sell your Personal Information to third parties. We may share your information in the following circumstances:

• Service Providers: We share information only with service providers (operators) that process it on our behalf and are required to keep it confidential: Vercel (website hosting), our email hosting provider (delivering contact form messages to our inbox), Cloudflare Turnstile (checking that contact form submissions come from people, not bots), Google Analytics (website statistics, only if you accept analytics cookies), Supabase (our database, and sign-in for existing clients to our client panel at edgepanel.techonedge.co.za, which has its own privacy notice), Anthropic (Claude, an AI assistant we use to run our administration, including enquiries, quotes, invoices and client emails), Paystack (online payments, for clients who choose to pay an invoice by card or instant EFT; we send Paystack the client's email address, the amount, the invoice number and the payment reference, and Paystack collects card and bank details itself under its own privacy policy, so we never see them; Paystack South Africa (Pty) Ltd, part of Stripe), and Afrihost (our domain registrar and email host, only when a client orders a domain or mailbox; Afrihost passes the registrant's details to the registry for the domain's ending, and some of those details may be published in the public domain lookup (WHOIS) unless the registry hides them). We don't use an outside accountant or debt collector.
• Outside South Africa: our database is stored in the United Kingdom, and some providers process information in the United States and elsewhere. Paystack may process payment information outside South Africa, under contracts that require it to protect it. The registries for domain endings other than .za may be outside South Africa. We only use providers bound by data protection law or written terms that give protection similar to POPIA's, as section 72 of POPIA requires.
• Legal Requirements: We may disclose your information if required to do so by law, court order, or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with legal obligations or protect the rights, property, or safety of TechOnEdge, our clients, or the public.
• Business Transfers: In the event of a merger, acquisition, restructuring, or sale of assets, your Personal Information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to the new entity honouring this Privacy Policy.
• With Your Consent: We may share your information with any other party with your explicit consent.

4. Data Security and Retention

We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your Personal Information from accidental loss, unauthorized access, use, alteration, or disclosure. However, no internet transmission is entirely secure, and we cannot guarantee the absolute security of your data.

Online payments are made on Paystack's secure checkout. We never see or store card numbers, CVVs or banking passwords; we keep only the payment reference, amount, date, payment method type and whether the payment went through, with our invoices.

Contact form submissions are sent to our inbox by email and are not stored in a website database. We keep enquiries that don't lead to work for up to 12 months. We keep client invoices and payment records, including online payments, for at least seven years, as company and tax law require. Online payment attempts that didn't go through are deleted after 12 months. We keep other client records, including plan changes and requests made in our client panel, for as long as you are a client and for up to two years afterwards. Client terms for payments, plans and domains are in our Client Terms.

5. Your Rights (POPIA Compliance)

As a data subject under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), you have certain rights concerning your Personal Information, including the right to:

• Access: Request a copy of the Personal Information we hold about you.
• Correction: Request that we correct any inaccurate or incomplete Personal Information.
• Deletion: Request that we delete your Personal Information, subject to legal and contractual exceptions.
• Objection: Object to the processing of your Personal Information.
• Withdraw Consent: Withdraw your consent for the processing of your Personal Information at any time, where processing is based on consent.

To exercise these rights, please contact our information officer using the details in Section 7. We may ask you to confirm who you are first. If you're not happy with our answer, you can complain to the Information Regulator at inforegulator.org.za (enquiries@inforegulator.org.za) or POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za. To request other records we hold, see our PAIA Manual.

6. Links to Other Websites

Our website may contain links to third-party websites, such as the hosting and software providers we work with. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of these external sites. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of any site you visit.

7. Contact Information

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us:

8. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make changes, we will revise the "Last Updated" date at the top of the policy. If a change affects how we use information we already hold, we will tell the people affected.