Privacy and POPIA notice

The people who keep this site are private individuals living in Pretoria East. There is no company behind the site, no registered entity and no third party processing your details on our behalf. The postal address and telephone number on the contact page are the ones to use for any privacy question.

Where this notice refers to privacy law, it means the national legislation protecting personal information in South Africa and the office of the regulator appointed under it. We name neither reference numbers nor case files, because there are none.

The form asks for a name, a telephone number, an electronic address, a subject line and a message. We ask for the telephone number because most car questions are answered faster by voice than in writing, and for the message because without it we cannot be useful. Nothing else is collected and no field is pre-filled from anywhere.

We use what you send for one purpose: replying to you about the car or the question you raised. We do not build a reader list, we do not send newsletters and we do not pass anything to dealers, finance houses, insurers or inspection facilities without asking you first in that specific message thread.

Messages and the details attached to them are deleted within twelve months of the conversation ending. In practice most are deleted far sooner, when the reader tells us the car was bought or abandoned. If you ask us to delete your message immediately we do it and confirm in writing.

Where a message has been answered and the matter is closed, we do not keep a copy for reference. There is no archive of reader questions on this site and no internal record built out of them.

This site does not use analytics of any kind. There is no measurement script, no advertising pixel, no social sharing widget that reports back, and no embedded content loaded from another party that could observe you. The pages are plain and that is deliberate.

Your browser stores exactly one value for this site, which records the choice you made in the cookie banner so that the banner stops asking. The cookie page explains it in more detail.

Like any website, this one sits on a hosting service which keeps technical logs of requests: an address, a time, the page requested and the browser string. Those logs exist for security and fault-finding, are kept for a short rolling period by the host and are not read by us unless something breaks.

We do not combine server logs with anything you send through the form, and we have no means of doing so even if we wanted to.

You may ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, or object to our using it at all. Telephone or write through the contact page and we will deal with it as soon as we read the message, which is usually within a working day.

If you are not satisfied with how we respond, you may take the matter to the national regulator responsible for the protection of personal information. We will give you the current contact route for that office on request, in writing.

This site is written for adult drivers and we do not knowingly collect information about anyone under eighteen. If a message reaches us from a minor we delete it and reply to say why.

If you send us somebody else's details, for example a seller's telephone number as part of a question about a car, please send only what is necessary. We use such details solely to help with your question and delete them with the rest of the thread.

When this notice changes we rewrite the page rather than appending a note to the bottom of it, and the build prints the date of the last change in the footer of every page. There is no version history and no archive of previous wording.

If a change ever affected what we do with information already sent to us, we would write to the readers concerned before making it.