POPIA and your rights

1.What POPIA is

The Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA) governs how organisations in South Africa collect, use, store and share personal information. It applies to Plotwise in full: it has no minimum size, no revenue threshold and no exemption for a site that is free to use.

Plotwise is the responsible party for the information it holds. You are the data subject. This page explains the rights that gives you and how to use them. What we actually collect, and why, is set out in our Privacy Policy.

2.Our section 18 notification

Section 18 of POPIA says we must tell you certain things when we collect your information. For the record, all in one place:

Who is collecting

Plotwise, a South African property search website operated by an individual. Contact: contact@plotwise.co.za.

What we collect

Account details, listing content, enquiry messages, saved activity, usage records and technical data. The full list is in section 2 of the Privacy Policy.

Where it comes from

From you directly, or from Google if you choose to sign in with a Google account.

Why we collect it

To run your account, publish your listings, deliver your enquiries, report listing performance to sellers, keep the site safe and improve it.

Is it voluntary?

Yes. You can browse Plotwise without giving us anything. If you want an account, a saved search or a listing, we need the information for that feature, and without it we cannot provide it.

Who receives it

Sellers and agents you enquire with, and our service providers: Google Firebase, Google Maps, Resend and Google Fonts.

Sent outside South Africa?

Yes. Our providers store and process information on servers outside South Africa. See section 7 of the Privacy Policy.

Your rights

Set out in section 3 below.

3.Your rights in detail

Access — section 23

You may ask us to confirm, free of charge, whether we hold personal information about you, and to give you a copy of it along with details of who has had access to it.

Correction and deletion — section 24

You may ask us to correct or delete information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete, misleading or obtained unlawfully, and to destroy information we are no longer authorised to keep. Most of this you can do yourself: edit your profile, edit or remove a listing, or delete a saved search from your dashboard.

Objection — section 11(3)

Where we process your information on the basis of legitimate interest, you may object on reasonable grounds relating to your situation. If you do, we stop unless the law requires otherwise.

Withdrawing consent — section 11(2)

Where we rely on your consent, you may withdraw it at any time. Withdrawing consent does not undo processing that already happened lawfully, and it may mean we can no longer provide part of the service.

Direct marketing — section 69

We do not send unsolicited marketing. If we ever do, you may object at any time and every message will carry an unsubscribe option.

Automated decisions — section 71

We do not make decisions about you by automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects.

Complaint and civil action — sections 74 and 99

You may complain to the Information Regulator, and you may approach a court for relief.

4.How to make a request

Email contact@plotwise.co.za from the email address on your Plotwise account, and include:

1. What you want: access, correction, deletion, objection or withdrawal of consent.
2. Enough detail for us to find the information, such as your account email, and the listing or enquiry you mean.
3. Proof that you are who you say you are. Sending the request from your registered email address is usually enough. If it does not match, or the request is unusually sensitive, we may ask for further verification before we act.
4. Where you would like our response sent.

If you prefer, the Information Regulator publishes standard POPIA forms on its website — Form 2 for access, Form 3 to object, Form 4 to request deletion. We accept a clear email just as readily.

5.How long we take, and what it costs

We acknowledge requests as soon as we can and aim to complete them within 30 days. If a request is complex, we will tell you before that period ends and explain how much longer we need.

Confirming whether we hold your information is free. Correction, deletion and objection are free. For a copy of your information we may charge a prescribed fee if the request is unusually large or repetitive, and we will always quote it before doing the work.

6.When we may refuse

We may decline all or part of a request where:

• we cannot satisfy ourselves that you are the person the information is about;
• giving you the information would reveal someone else’s personal information, in which case we give you what we can and redact the rest;
• the law requires us to keep the information;
• it relates to a listing or enquiry that another person also needs as their record of a dealing with you;
• the request is manifestly excessive or repetitive.

If we refuse, we will tell you why and remind you that you may complain to the Information Regulator.

7.If you post listings, POPIA applies to you too

When someone enquires about your property, you receive their name, email address and message. From that moment you are a responsible party for that information under POPIA, and Plotwise is not responsible for what you do with it. That means:

• Use their details only to respond to that enquiry.
• Do not add them to a marketing list, sell their details, or pass them to anyone else without their consent.
• Keep the details secure, and delete them when you no longer need them.
• Do not publish anyone else’s personal information in a listing, including photographs of tenants, their possessions or their documents.

Misusing enquiry details breaches our Terms of Use and may breach POPIA. We will remove listings and close accounts where this happens.

8.Security compromises

If personal information under our control is accessed or acquired by an unauthorised person, section 22 of POPIA requires us to notify the Information Regulator and every affected person as soon as reasonably possible. Our notice will describe what happened, what information was involved, what we are doing about it and what you can do to protect yourself.

If you spot a security problem on Plotwise, please tell us at contact@plotwise.co.za rather than making it public, and give us a fair chance to fix it.

9.The Information Regulator

The Information Regulator enforces POPIA. You can complain to it directly, and you do not need our permission or a lawyer to do so.