Privacy Policy

Our Information Officer can be reached at privacy@makhelwane.co.za or by post at WeWork, 155 West Street, Sandown, Sandton, 2031, Gauteng, South Africa.

Information you give us.

• Your username, email address and password (stored only as a cryptographic hash — we cannot read it).
• Your community and, if you choose, your sub-community.
• Anything you choose to put in your profile, such as a short bio or a contact number.
• The content you post: discussions, replies, listings, gifts, rides, SOS alerts, reviews, private messages and images.
• If you register as an advertiser: your business name and contact details, and a record of the token packages you buy.
• If you ask us to add a community: the suburb and, optionally, your name, email address and a note.
• Anything you send us by email or in a report.

Information we collect automatically. Server logs containing your IP address, the pages requested, timestamps and your browser type; and a session cookie that keeps you logged in. We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies.

What we do not collect. We do not ask for your ID number, your physical address or your banking details, and you should never post them publicly.

POPIA requires us to have a lawful justification. Ours are:

• To provide the service — creating your account, showing your posts to neighbours, delivering messages, processing advertising tokens. This is necessary to perform our agreement with you.
• To keep the platform safe — investigating reports, moderating content, preventing fraud and abuse, and enforcing our Terms and Community Guidelines. This is our legitimate interest and, at times, a legal obligation.
• To communicate with you — password resets, service notices and replies to your questions.
• To comply with the law — responding to lawful requests from the police, a court or a regulator.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not send marketing email without your consent. You may withdraw consent at any time.

Your email address and password are never shown to other members. Private messages are visible to you, the person you sent them to, and — where a report or investigation requires it — our moderators.

We share personal information only with operators who process it on our behalf, under contract and on our instructions:

• Amazon Web Services — hosting and email delivery, in the EU (Ireland) region.
• Cloudinary — storage and delivery of the images you upload.
• Payment gateways (PayFast/Ozow) — for advertiser token purchases. They handle your card or banking details directly; we never see or store them.

We will also disclose information where the law requires it, or where we reasonably believe it is necessary to prevent harm, investigate fraud or abuse, or report a crime — see section 9.

Our servers are in the European Union and some of our operators are outside South Africa. POPIA section 72 permits this where the recipient is subject to laws or binding agreements that provide a comparable level of protection. Where we rely on an operator outside South Africa, our contract with them requires that standard.

We keep your account information for as long as your account is open. If you ask us to delete your account we remove your profile and personal details; posts that form part of a conversation may remain with your name removed, so that discussions others took part in still make sense. Server logs are kept for a short period for security and troubleshooting. We keep records of advertising purchases for as long as tax and company law require, and we may keep information longer where it is needed for a legal claim or an investigation.

• To be told what personal information we hold about you, and to receive a copy.
• To have information that is inaccurate, misleading or out of date corrected, or to have information deleted where we no longer have grounds to keep it.
• To object to processing based on our legitimate interests.
• To withdraw consent where we relied on it.
• To complain to the Information Regulator.

Write to privacy@makhelwane.co.za. We may need to confirm your identity first, and we will respond within a reasonable time. You also have rights under the Promotion of Access to Information Act 2 of 2000; our PAIA manual is available on request.

You can complain directly to the Information Regulator (South Africa) at complaints.IR@justice.gov.za or inforegulator.org.za.

We will report illegal activity to the South African Police Service or the relevant authority, and provide the information we hold, where the law requires it or where we consider it necessary — including for threats of violence, fraud, the sexual exploitation or abuse of children, the distribution of intimate images without consent, and offences under the Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020.

We use HTTPS throughout, hash passwords, restrict administrative access and keep least-privilege database credentials for each service. No system is completely secure, however, and we cannot guarantee that information sent over the internet is safe from interception. If a breach occurs that creates a risk to you, we will notify you and the Information Regulator as POPIA section 22 requires.

Makhelwane is not intended for children under 18. We do not knowingly collect the personal information of a child, and POPIA treats such information as specially protected. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us at privacy@makhelwane.co.za and we will remove it.

We may update this policy. The date at the top always reflects the current version, and we will tell you about material changes through the site. Continuing to use Makhelwane after a change means you accept the updated policy. See also our Terms of Use.