Privacy Policy
Affinity Solutions
2 Park Lane, Umhlanga, Durban, 4051
At Affinity Solutions, we strive to ensure that your information is handled in accordance with data protection law. The Protection of Personal Information Act No. 12 of 2013 (POPIA) governs personal data used in South Africa, while the Data Protection Act, 2018 (DPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) governs personal data of European citizens. This data protection legislation states that personal information must be:
- Used lawfully, in a reasonable manner and in a transparent way.
- Collected only for a specific purpose that is clearly explained and not used in a way that is incompatible with its purposes.
- Relevant to the purposes and limited only to those purposes.
- Complete, accurate and kept up to date.
- Kept only as long as necessary for its purpose.
- Kept securely.
If you have any questions about this notice or how we collect and use personal information gathered from you, please contact us at: info@affinitysolutions.co.
How and Why Do We Collect Your Information?
When you complete the contact form on our website, we collect personal information directly from you, including your name, contact details such as email addresses and cell phone numbers.
When you submit any documentation on our website, such as a curriculum vitae, we securely store this information.
We may retain information obtained from communications with you, in the form of emails, phone calls, SMS’s, social media, and instant messaging.
We also receive information about you via third party service providers who assist with our marketing. This is detailed further below.
We use the information obtained to provide you with our services and to send you marketing via email, SMS, or to call you about our products and services. We may inform you of our other related products from other companies that may be suitable for you. We may send you marketing by email or SMS or call you about products or services offered by other companies if you ask us to. You may ask us to stop sending you marketing information about our and other companies’ products or services at any time by calling or sending an email to info@affinitysolutions.co.
Our Services
When you apply for or enquire about one of our services, we collect your personal information directly from you in order to optimally provide the best service. This information may include identity numbers, addresses, locations, employment details, and other general or financial information.
Website
We may collect information about you from the use of our website via technical means such as cookies, webpage counters and other analytics tools. We use this as necessary for our legitimate interests in administering our website and to ensure it operates effectively and securely.
Our website may, from time to time, contain links to third-party websites, plug-ins, and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy notice of every website you visit.
Our website contains contact forms where you provide your personal information in order to download content, contact us or raise queries with us. We keep this data in our web database for a limited period.
Cookies
We collect certain information automatically by using cookies when you visit our website. This information includes your device operating system, access times, location and use of the website.
We use this information to improve the way our website functions in order to provide a better service.
You can manage your cookies settings through your web browser.
Affinity Solutions will handle your personal information in terms of our Cookie Policy.
Third Parties
We may receive information about you from the following sources:
Our service providers: We work closely with third parties (including, for example, business partners, sub-contractors in technical, payment and delivery services, advertising networks, analytics providers and search information providers) who may provide us with information about you, to be used as set out above.
Businesses we have acquired: If we have acquired another business, or substantially all of its assets, which originally held your information, we will hold and use the information you provided to them, or which they otherwise held about you, in accordance with this privacy notice.
Our other channels: This is information we receive about you if you use any of the other websites of our group companies, subsidiary companies or our partners, or the other services or products we provide. In this case we will have informed you when we collected that data if we intend to share that data internally and combine it with data collected on this website. If you have filled in an online survey for our benefit, then we may keep this data for a limited period.
Credit information: We may also collect credit information on you from third party reference agencies and we may also share your information with affiliate third parties.
We share your information with the service providers who help us deliver our services only if they have agreed to protect your information. We may share your information with other companies or companies affiliated with Affinity Solutions that provide support services. Some of our service providers are situated overseas, and we may share your personal information with them.
If there is a change in our company structure or ownership, we may share your information as part of the assets transferred, or the due diligence for that transaction.
We ensure that any disclosure of your information is done so in accordance with data protection laws.
Information Security
We have sufficient measures in place to provide for appropriate internal security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, or from being altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and necessary third parties who have a business need to know only. They will only process your personal information on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breaches and will notify you, together with the Regulator, of a suspected breach where necessary.
If you suspect a security breach, please let us know immediately by sending an email to info@affinitysolutions.co.
How Long Do We Keep Your Information For?
We generally keep your information for a limited period on completion of its purpose. In some circumstances, it may be necessary to keep your information for longer than that in order to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal information, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal information, the purposes for which we process your personal information and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means.
In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you.
Marketing
We may collect your name and contact details (such as your email address, phone number or address) in order to send you information about our products and services which you might be interested in. We may collect this directly from you, or through a third party. If a third party collected your name and contact details, we will process your information based on legitimate interests to send you a fair processing notice and then respect any communication preferences you give us.
You always have the right to “opt out” of receiving our marketing. You can exercise the right at any time by contacting us at info@affinitysolutions.co. If we send you any marketing emails, we will provide an unsubscribe option to allow you to opt out of any further marketing emails.
If you are an existing customer or are acting as a business, we use your contact details as necessary for our legitimate interests in marketing to you and maintaining a list of potential customers.
If you are not an existing customer, and are not acting as a business, we will only contact you for marketing purposes with your consent (whether we have collected your details directly from you, or through a third party) or following an action from yourself to download our materials or contact us about our products or services.
We will not share your name or contact details with third parties for marketing purposes unless we receive your consent. We may use third party service providers to send out our marketing, but we will only allow them to use that information on our instructions and where they have agreed to treat the information confidentially and to keep it secure.
We retain your details on our marketing list until you “opt-out” at which point we add you to our suppression list. We may keep that suppression list indefinitely to comply with our legal obligations to ensure we do not accidentally send you any more marketing.
Your Rights
Data protection legislation gives you a number of rights when it comes to personal information we hold about you. The key rights are set out below. Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:
You have the right to
- ask what personal information we have about you;
- ask what personal information we sent to our suppliers, service providers, or anyone else;
- ask us to update, correct, or delete any out-of-date or incorrect personal information we have about you;
- unsubscribe from any direct marketing communications we may send you,
- object to the processing of your personal information; and
- lodge a complaint about our practices with the relevant Regulator or Commission.
It can take us up to 21 days to respond to your request because there are procedures that we need to follow.
In some instances, we may need proof of your identity, and sometimes we may have additional requirements before we can update your information.
Changes to Privacy Notice
This notice was last updated in May 2023.
Any changes we make to our privacy notice in the future will be posted on this page and, where appropriate, notified to you by e-mail or otherwise.