Privacy Policy

Consnet (Pty) Ltd (“the Company/ we”/”us”) is committed to protecting and respecting any personal information you share with us. This statement applies to Personal Information provided to the Company, its agents, partners, agencies, clients, departments and affiliates.

In terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act (Section 18) we are required to provide you with this notification. This statement describes what types of information we collect from you or which we may collect from third parties, how it is used by us, how we share data with others, how you can manage the information we hold and how you can contact us. The information below describes processing of your personal information which we obtain through a variety of different interactions, including when you visit our websites, social media pages, events or webinars.

For the purposes of data protection laws, we are a Responsible Party, responsible for your personal information, which means we decide why and how it is processed. It also means we are responsible for that processing, which extends to those of our service providers who process your information based on our instructions. We work with other, more independent, organisations in connection with some of the processing activities described in this statement, such as social media platforms, authorised Dealer Partners and our group companies. Where that information is collected and sent to other organisations for processing that is in both our and their interests, we will be making decisions together in relation to that particular processing and will be jointly responsible with the organisations involved. We and the other organisations involved in making these decisions will be jointly responsible to you in terms of the Protection of Personal Information Act for this processing. In other circumstances, the organisation receiving your information will be separately responsible to you and use your personal information in the ways described in its privacy statement (and not ours).

You will always have the option not to receive marketing communications from us. We will never send you unsolicited spam email or communications, or share your data with anyone else who might. We do not sell your information to third parties, but we do work closely with our selected partners who help us to provide you with the information, events and services that you request from us.

The contents of this statement may change from time to time so you may wish to check this page occasionally to ensure you are still happy to share your information with us.

A. What information do we collect?

We collect information about you and your activity when you engage with our website and social media pages. 

The information we collect includes, but not limited to, some or all of the following:

  1. Name (including title);
  2. Address;
  3. Phone number;
  4. Date of birth;
  5. Email address;
  6. Job role;
  7. Country;
  8. The pages you visited on our website and how long you visited us for;
  9. Your IP address;
  10. Your GPS location (where you have permitted access to this);
  11. The Internet browser and devices you are using;
  12. Cookie, Pixels or Beacon information (for more information please see our Cookie Policy );
  13. The website address from which you accessed our website;
  14. Where you engage with us in a business context, we may collect your job title, company contact details (including email addresses), company size and company details (some of which we may obtain from an online or public business directories);
  15. “Web chat” records, if applicable;
  16. Any information within correspondence you send to us including in any competition entries you submit;
  17. Your social media name and identification number, any information you post on our social media pages, posts in which you include a hashtag or mention relating to us and information regarding your activities on our social media pages generally (for example, the time and date of your posts and your likes):
  18. Your direct marketing preferences;
  19. Information we receive about you from data cleansing, enrichment and other data analytics provider’s information about your race, gender and income scale in an aggregated data format and not a personalised data format.
  20. Where you act on behalf of a business, any information we collect as part of business telemarketing activity; and views and opinions as part of surveys
  21. Any personal information that we obtain from you directly is provided to us on a voluntary basis. However, if you do not give this information to us, you may be unable to receive certain services from us or our partners or communicate with us effectively.

B. How do we use this information?

The Company and its partners will only process information that is necessary for the purpose for which it has been collected. You will always have the option not to receive marketing communications from us (and you can withdraw your consent or object at any time). We will never send you unsolicited spam email or communications, or share your personal information with anyone else who might.

There are various ways in which we may use or process your personal information. We list these below:

Consent:

Where you have provided your consent, we may use and process your information:

• To contact you from time to time about promotions, events, products, services or information which we think may be of interest to you;

• To use algorithms, mathematical and statistical methods to create information and offers customised for you based on your information, including by making predictions about your behaviour.

We rely on our legitimate interests as the legal reason to use your information for these purposes if we collect your information from another source.

You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us on the details here or, in relation to any marketing messages you receive, by using the unsubscribe option included in those messages.

We also process personal information we obtain from optional cookies that we set on this website based on your consent. For more information, please review our Cookie Policy.

We collect and analyse this information in this way so that we can deliver the most appropriate customer experience to you by tailoring and making relevant all our services and communications, including by making predictions about your current or future needs or interests;

Processing necessary for us to promote our business, brands and products and measure the reach and effectiveness of our campaigns

  1. To contact you from time to time with marketing information after you have attended a webinar or event, participated in a marketing campaign or other information of interest. We will only contact you with information about our own initiatives (and in ways the law allows), which we hope you will like. You have the right to object to us sending you this information at any time;
  2. To use mathematical and statistical methods to create information and communication customised for you based on your information, including by making predictions about your behaviour. This may include predicting your preferences, suitable initiatives recommendations, and your likelihood of engaging in another initiative or social media post.
  3. To contact you with targeted advertising delivered online through social media, search engines, third party websites, applications, and other platforms operated by other companies, unless you object. You may receive advertising based on information about you that we have provided to the platform or allowed it to collect using cookies on our website or code in our applications (or a combination of the two). You may also receive advertising because, at our request, the platform has identified you as falling within a group whose attributes we have selected or a group that has similar attributes to the individuals whose details it has received from us (or a combination of the two). To find out more, please refer to the information provided in the help pages of the platforms on which you receive advertising from us. Please also see the section below for further information regarding our use of social media platforms specifically;
  4. To identify and record when you have received, opened or engaged with our website or electronic communications (please see our Cookie Policy for more information);
  5. To administer competitions and promotions that you enter with us from time to time and to distribute prizes;
  6. To identify the extent to which your interactions and communications with us or our content contributed to your engagement with us or our brand;
  7. To communicate with you (including through social media) including to respond to queries, requests and requirements;
  8. To enforce or protect our legal rights or to establish, bring or defend legal claims;
  9. Processing necessary for us to operate the administrative and technical aspects of our institution efficiently and effectively
  10. To verify the accuracy of information that we hold about you and create a better understanding of you as a customer. We may use information about you from third party data providers for this purpose, including verification and data cleansing service providers that provide the latest home address, contact number, e-mail address for you;
  11. For network and information security purposes i.e. in order for us to take reasonable steps to protect your information against loss, damage, theft or unauthorised access;
  12. To comply with a request from you in connection with the exercise of your rights (for example where you have asked us not to contact you for marketing purposes, we will keep a record of this on our suppression lists in order to be able to comply with your request);
  13. To inform you of updates to our terms and conditions and policies;
  14. For cookies that are essential for our website to function properly. Please see our Cookie Policy for further information;

Legal Obligation:

We may process your personal information to comply with our legal or regulatory requirements (for example to assist, or respond to a request for information from, an authorised authority, regulatory body or court, or to respond to a court order). These requirements include processing to remember your cookie consent preferences for optional cookies used by our website.

Please see our Cookie Policy for further information.

Vital Interest:

Sometimes we will need to process your personal information to contact you if there is an urgent safety issue where we need to inform you.

C. How do we share information?

We do not sell your information to third parties, but we do work closely with other departments in Foreign Affairs, Italian and international entities, Universities, cultural institutes, marketing agencies, to name a few, who fulfil business activities for us (like roadside assistance, marketing, events and market research etc.)

Service providers:

We do not sell your information to third parties. However, we may from time to time disclose your information to the following categories of companies or organisations to which we pass the responsibility to handle services on our behalf: hosting providers, data cleansing and verification providers, direct marketing communications agencies and consultants, market research and market analytics service providers, our legal and other professional advisors.

Sharing for legal reasons:

We will also share your personal information if we have a duty to do so, e.g. to assist an authorised authority, regulatory body or court, or to enforce or protect our legal rights or to establish, bring or defend legal claims.

Social Media Platforms:

We use a number of different social media platforms to communicate with you and to promote products and services. We process your personal information using these platforms in a variety of ways, as follows:

Pages:

We use your personal information when you post content or otherwise interact with us on our official pages on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and other social media platforms. We also use the Page Insights service for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to view statistical information and reports regarding your interactions with the pages we administer on those platforms and their content. Where those interactions are recorded and form part of the information we access through these Page Insights services, the relevant platform and we are joint controllers of the processing necessary to provide that service to us.

Cookies:

We may make use of various social media platforms to further engage with you from time to time. We use cookies and similar technologies in our websites and applications to collect and send information to Facebook and LinkedIn about actions you take on our website and applications. In particular:

Facebook uses this information to provide services to us and also for further processing for its own business purposes. Facebook and we are joint controllers of the processing involved in collecting and sending your personal information to Facebook using cookies and similar technologies as each of us has a business interest in Facebook receiving this information. You can find out more about these technologies by visiting our Cookie Policy. The services we receive from Facebook that use this information are delivered to us through Facebook’s Business Tools, which include Facebook Pixel, App Events SDK and Website Custom Audiences. These tools allow us to target advertising to you within Facebook’s social media platform by creating audiences based on your actions on our website and applications and allow Facebook to improve and optimise the targeting and delivery of our advertising campaigns for us.

Our relationship with Social Media Platforms

The respective social media platform also processes, as our processor, personal information that we submit for the purposes of matching, online targeting, measurement, and reporting and analytics purposes. These services include the processing these platforms carry out when they display our advertisements to you in your news feed at our request after matching contact details for you that we have uploaded to them. These advertisements may include forms through which we collect contact information you give to us.

Transfers outside the Republic of South Africa:

Due to the international nature of our institution, there may be some instances where your information is processed or stored outside of the Republic of South Africa and EU. In those instances, we will take reasonable measures to ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place for that transfer and storage as required by applicable law.

Safeguards:

We take reasonable steps to ensure that any third party partners who handle your information comply with data protection legislation and protect your information just as we do. We only disclose personal information that is necessary for them to provide the service that they are undertaking on our behalf. We will aim to anonymise your information or use aggregated none specific data sets wherever possible.

D. How long do we keep your information for?

We will not hold your personal information in an identifiable format for any longer than is necessary. If you are a customer or otherwise have a relationship with us we will hold personal information about you for a longer period than if we have obtained your details in connection with a prospective relationship.

If we have a relationship with you, we hold your personal information for 25 years from the date our relationship ends. We hold your personal information after our relationship ends as required by other regulatory requirements. 

Where we have obtained your personal information following a request for information, we hold your personal information for an indefinite period from the date we collect that information, unless during that period you opt out of or unsubscribe from receiving marketing information.

Where you have consented to receive marketing, regardless of whether or not we have a relationship with you, we will retain information we need to market to you until such time as you opt out or unsubscribe from receiving marketing information.

We hold your personal information for the above periods to give us an opportunity to form a relationship with you.

The only exceptions to the periods mentioned above are where:

• The law requires us to hold your personal information for a longer period, or de-identify or delete it sooner;
• Where you have raised a legal claim, complaint or concern regarding an event, initiative or service offered by us.

E. How can you manage the information we hold about you?

You have the right as an individual to access your personal information we hold about you and make corrections if necessary and the right to object to the processing of your personal information. You also have the right to withdraw any consent you have previously given us and ask us to erase information we hold about you. You can also object to us using your personal information (where we rely on our business interests to process and use your personal information).

You have a number of rights in relation to your personal information under data protection law. In relation to most rights, we will ask you for information to confirm your identity and, where applicable, to help us search for your personal information. Except in rare cases, we will respond to you within 30 days after we have received any request (including any identification documents requested).

You have the right to:

1. Ask for a copy of the information that we hold about you;
2. Correct and update your information;
3. Withdraw your consent (where we rely on it). Please see further How do we use this information;
4. Object to our use of your information (where we rely on our legitimate interests to use your personal information) provided we do not have any continuing lawful reason to continue to use and process the information. When we do rely on our legitimate interests to use your personal information for direct marketing, we will always comply with your right to object;
5. Erase your information (or restrict the use of it), provided we do not have any continuing lawful reason to continue to use and process that information;
6. Transfer your information in a structured data file (in a commonly used and machine-readable format), where we rely on your consent to use and process your personal information or need to process it in connection with your contract.

You can exercise the above rights and/or manage your information by contacting us using the details below:

Contact details of the Responsible Party.

E-mail: info@consnet.co.za

If you are unhappy, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator.

The contact details for the Information Regulator:

Contact Details:

Physical address: JD House, 27 Stiemens Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 2001

Postal address: P.O Box 31533, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 2017

Complaints email: complaints.IR@justice.gov.za

General enquiries email: inforeg@justice.gov.za.

For any questions on this website contact: info@consnet.co.za