POPI ACT: ( Protection of Personal Information ) None of our clients’ information provided is available in the public domain, and sensitive information is protected at various levels. Any printed sensitive and historical documentation is kept within a dedicated vault within our premises, which was previously owned by a reputable law firm, and this built in vault room, with steel doors and multiple steel pins, is kept locked and secured with an alarm system when our staff leave the building.
We use this information only for the time frame and purposes it was provided by our clients, and not for any selling of information to third parties, for further gain. {For example, a repeat client uses us for their holidays, and we keep their personal information confidential/ and on file, to ensure we do not need to collect this information each time. } Online information and backups are kept within a cloud-based server and are accessible by password-protected permission only.
The purpose of the POPI act is to protect the personal information of clients and is set up to balance the right to privacy with other rights such as access to information. Personal information relates to an identifiable, natural or legal entity and includes, but is not entirely limited to:
The POPI Act applies to every business in South Africa that collects, uses, stores or destroys personal information in their day to day business activities.
Some of the key obligations from our company include:
To only collect information for a specific purpose, such as paying for your trip or completing a booking form with flight details, dietary requirements, special requests, net of kin information etc; to ensure that the information is applied for our needs ( eg passports to book flights, ccard details to deduct a deposit agreed upon in writing on your invoice, and with express permission in the future to use these details again for a further payment and are up to date; to have reasonable/ feasible security measures in place in our company in order to protect the information; to only keep the necessary information; and to allow the data subject to obtain or view his or her information on request. Legal processing of personal information Processing of the booking form, passports or flight details etc, are all examples of what involves anything that is done with personal information and includes the collection, use, storage, dissemination, modification or destruction of personal information (regardless of whether the processing is automatic).
We are required then to ensure that we comply:
Our business periodically sends out special offers and newsletters, and we provide clearly an opt-in and opt-out/unsubscribe option when contacting a data subject/ client for periodic marketing purposes. Our policy is to do so at a maximum rate of once every 4 weeks, and we are sensitive to not “spam’ the client on a highly repetitive basis, which might prove beyond the comfortable standards of acceptable frequency of contact for our updates and special offers. Our clients are more than welcome to request less communication or no communication, by unsubscribing from our newsletters.