Privacy Policy

Children under the age of 18

This website is intended for a business audience and is not directed at children. Under POPIA a child is anyone under the age of 18, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from a child without the consent of a competent person.

If you are under 18, please do not use this website or submit any information through it. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child without the necessary consent, we will delete it.

If you believe we may have information about a child in your care, contact us at hello@touchfoundry.co.za and we will remove it.

Information we collect about you

We collect information in two ways: information you give us directly, and information gathered automatically as you move around the site.

You give us information when you complete an enquiry form, contact us by email, respond to a survey, subscribe to something, or otherwise correspond with us. This typically includes your name, your email address, the company you work for, a telephone number if you choose to give one, the content of your message, and the answers you give to any questions the form asks. We use this to respond to you, to provide and improve our services, and to keep in touch about work you have asked us about.

Information gathered automatically may include your IP address, your browser type and version, your operating system and device, your approximate location, the pages you visit and the time you spend on them, the links you click, and the website or search that referred you. This is collected through cookies, server logs and similar technologies. It is not on its own intended to identify you, though it may be associated with information you have given us voluntarily.

Use of cookies and pixels

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to store, so that something can be remembered between one page and the next. Our servers also keep standard logs recording the date and time of a visit, the pages viewed, the time spent on the site, the referring website and the IP address of the visitor.

We group cookies by what they are for. Strictly necessary cookies keep the site working and cannot be switched off. Preference cookies remember a choice you have made, such as which version of the site to show you. Analytics and performance cookies tell us which pages are read and where the site is slow or broken, reported in aggregate.

We reserve the right to use technological equivalents of cookies, including pixels or similar tags provided by social media and advertising platforms, in order to measure campaigns or to show our own content to people who have visited this site. Where we do, we follow the policies of the platform concerned.

Optional cookies stay off until you accept them. We ask once, when you first arrive, and record your answer for six months. You can change your mind at any time using the panel at the foot of this page, and the change takes effect immediately. Your browser also lets you view, delete and refuse cookies, usually under settings labelled privacy or site data, though blocking strictly necessary cookies will break parts of this site.

Third-party use of cookies

Some content on this website is served by other companies, including embedded video, images, fonts, analytics and advertising or measurement services. Those companies may set their own cookies or web beacons when their content loads or when you interact with it, and they may use them to collect information about you across this and other websites.

We do not control the tracking practices of these third parties, and their use of any information they collect is governed by their own privacy policies rather than by this one. Where a provider offers a setting that limits tracking, we use it. If you want to know more about a specific provider's practices, or to opt out of their tracking, you should contact them directly.

Email information

If you send us an email, complete a form on this site, or otherwise correspond with us, we retain that correspondence together with our response, so that we have a record of what was discussed and can pick the conversation back up.

We give email correspondence the same protection we give information received by post or telephone, and access to it is limited to the people who need it in order to do their work.

Email policies

We do not sell, rent, lease or otherwise trade email addresses with anyone.

Any marketing email we send will clearly identify Touchfoundry as the sender, will relate to work of the kind you have asked us about, and will carry a plain way to unsubscribe. Unsubscribe requests are honoured promptly. This is consistent with section 69 of POPIA, which governs direct marketing in South Africa, and with international standards such as the United States CAN-SPAM Act.

We do not add you to a mailing list simply because you enquired. Where we do send a newsletter or similar communication, we will have asked for your consent first, and you can withdraw it at any time by using the link at the foot of any message or by writing to hello@touchfoundry.co.za.

How and why we collect information

We collect personal information in order to record and support your contact with us, to understand what you are interested in, to provide the services you ask for, and to communicate with you about them.

Most of what this website does requires no personal information at all. You can read every page, article and case study without telling us anything about yourself. Information is only collected at the point where you choose to get in touch, subscribe to something, or otherwise ask us for something.

We will only ask for information that is reasonably necessary for the purpose at hand, and we will not make the provision of a service conditional on you giving us more than that purpose requires.

How we use the information you provide

We may use the information you provide to present this website and its contents to you; to respond to your enquiry; to provide you with information, products or services you have asked for; to prepare and perform a contract with you; to administer our business and our relationship with you; to provide customer service and support; to notify you about changes to our services; and to improve how this site and our services work.

We may also use it to make you aware of other services we offer that are relevant to what you approached us about, and from time to time to tell you about work or thinking of ours we believe would interest you. You can ask us to stop at any time.

Where we use information gathered automatically, we use it in aggregate, to keep the site secure, to diagnose faults, to understand which content is useful and to improve the experience.

Disclosure of your information

We do not sell, rent or lease your personal information to anyone, and we do not transfer it to third parties except as set out below.

We may disclose it to our subsidiaries, affiliates and to service providers who perform functions on our behalf, such as hosting, form processing, email delivery, analytics and support tooling. They act on our instruction, for our purposes and not their own, and are bound to protect the information they handle. Some of these providers operate outside South Africa, so this may involve transferring information across a border; where it does, we use providers offering protection comparable to what POPIA requires.

We may disclose it where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to enforce or apply our terms, to investigate a suspected breach of them, or to protect the rights, property or safety of Touchfoundry, our clients, our people or others.

We may disclose it to a successor in the event of a merger, restructuring, acquisition or sale of all or part of our business, in which case it would remain subject to a policy no less protective than this one.

We may disclose it where we are required to do so by law, by a court order, or by a request from a regulatory or government body with the authority to make it.

How we protect your information and secure information transmissions

We use commercially reasonable methods to keep personal information secure. The website is served over an encrypted connection, access to enquiry information is limited to the people who need it, and we keep our systems and dependencies current.

Email is not a secure method of transmitting information, and we would ask you not to send sensitive information to us by email. In particular, never send payment card details by email, to us or to anyone else.

We use reputable third-party vendors to host and support this site, and we monitor for unauthorised attempts to upload, alter or damage information held on it.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so while we take these steps we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a security compromise ever affected your personal information, we would notify you and the Information Regulator as POPIA requires.

How long we keep your information

We keep personal information for as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for, and for any further period the law requires us to keep it. Enquiries are kept while the conversation is live and for a reasonable time afterwards, so that we have a record of what was discussed.

We may also delete it earlier where we no longer have a reason to hold it, or at your request.

Your rights

Under POPIA you have the right to ask us to confirm whether we hold personal information about you and to provide you with a copy of it; to correct or complete anything that is inaccurate, misleading or out of date; to delete or destroy information we no longer have a lawful reason to hold; and to object, on reasonable grounds, to our processing it. You may also withdraw any consent you have given, at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of what was done before you withdrew it.

If you are in the European Union, the equivalent rights under the General Data Protection Regulation apply, including the right to obtain your personal data in a portable format, the right to restrict processing, and the right to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority.

There is no charge for making a request. Write to hello@touchfoundry.co.za and we will act on it.

Complaints

If you believe we have handled your personal information improperly, please tell us first so that we have the opportunity to put it right.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa, whether or not you have raised the matter with us. Complaints are lodged on POPIA Form 5, through the Regulator's eServices portal or by email to POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za. Their website is inforegulator.org.za.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time as our services, this website or the law change. Any change will be posted on this page, and the date at the top tells you which version you are reading. Where a change is material we will take reasonable steps to bring it to your attention.

Please review this page periodically, and keep your contact details with us current so that we can reach you if we need to.

Contact us

For any question about this policy, or to make a request about your own information, write to hello@touchfoundry.co.za and it will reach our Information Officer.

Touchfoundry (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2012/169705/07. Unit 10 Canterbury Studios, 35 Wesley Street, Gardens, Cape Town 8001, South Africa.