Privacy Policy

What information do we collect?
In light of various changes to laws abroad and upcoming local laws in South Africa, which related to the protection of personal information, we have made various changes to our website, our privacy policy and the access to information we provide to registered users. In order to comply with all local and international laws, we removed various sets of information and restricted access to others, in order to fall within the ambit of various laws and ensure we act accordingly. We collect information from you when you fill out a form in order to contact us or make use of any of our online services. We collect your names, surname, e-mail address and log your IP Address. Visitors or users of the Platform contacting us via our online contact form or directly via our e-mail address. In addition, users signing up with us in order to conduct historical research. When contacting us, we require users to provide us with a name, surname, e-mail address and phone number. This information is only used to reply to communications received or come into contact with the person contacting us. The information is only being accessed by our online support staff, who are responsible for attending to user queries. After the query has been dealt with this information is deleted from our system and cannot be accessed any longer. When a user signs up for an account with us, we do require a name, surname, phone number and e-mail address. This information is required to identify the user accessing and using our services. It also enables our automatic system to create a member account and send access confirmation to the user when registration processes are completed. We may also use this information to contact the user about any problems experienced with usage on the account. Our system also automatically logs all member IP Addresses, which are associated with every member for legal purposes should the need arise. In addition, IP Addresses allows us to exercise maximum security on our system and identify any potential misuse of login information. This information can only be accessed by our support, management and IT staff in the event any problem should arise on the account. The information will be kept safely secured as long as the member remains an active user of our services. As part of security implementations and controlling who accesses information on our services, we also do log all search history conducted by users. All search terms are logged to all user accounts. Registered volunteers or staff assisting with data transcription or contribution of information. When joining us as a registered volunteer or staff member, we do collect information such as names, surname, identity number, phone number, employment information, addresses, e-mail addresses and family reference information. This information is used only by our management to confirm the identities of staff or volunteers who will be working on sensitive data on our project. This information will be kept offline and will be accessible only by management of Identitynumber.org Record Subject You may be a Record Subject on who data was collected from public sources and is included in our databases. We collect and process publicly available documents, released by the South African Government and on online platforms or services. These documents consist of marriage certificates, death notices, baptism records and other historical documents. Although these documents may contain information such as identity numbers, names and surnames, address information and much more, we only collect the required information necessary for the purposes of Genealogy Research, Historical and Statistical reasons. This information only includes names, surnames, date of birth, spouse and children names and date of births and area information where available. In order to protect the personal information of Record Subjects, we do not keep or make available any other information that are available on these publicly accessible records. Please note that we do not collect personal information on any Data Subjects outside South Africa. Our purpose is to collect Genealogy information on South African nationals from public sources. If you should hold dual nationality, or obtain such nationality or citizenship at any point in time, we consider your information as being a South African as it was mentioned and released by Government. We consider it legal, in terms of local and international laws, to process this information for research purposes, including statistical and historic purposes. This information is also made available in public interest. However, if you do find this information causing you distress, please contact us with immediate effect at info@identitynumber.org. We may require you to provide us with proof of identity and further information on why you consider the information to be causing any distress. Should you come across any inaccurate information, please contact us at info@identitynumber.org. We do accept that transcription errors may occur. We will evaluate all requests for correcting information. Please note that if there were any errors in the original document, we will not be in a position to correct this information, as our intention is to properly record historic data on our system. In these events, we may add notes to inform researchers using our system of the possible error.

What do we use your information for?
Any of the information we collect from you may be used in one of the following ways:

- To improve our website
(we continually strive to improve our website offerings based on the information and feedback we receive from you)
- To track website activities
(we continually monitor usage for misuse or other uses as not intended by various laws in South Africa and abroad)
- To improve customer service
(your information helps us to more effectively respond to your customer service requests and support needs)

How do we protect your information?
We implement a variety of security measures to maintain the safety of your personal information when you enter, submit, or access your personal information. It may be required from us to Transfer certain information outside our local area in South Africa, such when registering a new account and making payment via Paypal in the United States. In these events we ensure that all information is transferred using secure encryption technology to our payment solution provider. These technologies are aimed at protecting the information we transfer cross-border.

We offer the use of a secure server. All supplied sensitive/credit information is transmitted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and then encrypted into our database only to be accessible by those authorized with special access rights to such systems, and are required to keep the information confidential.

Do we use cookies?
Yes (Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computers hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the sites or service providers systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information.

We use cookies to understand and save your preferences for future visits and compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future.

Do we disclose any information to outside parties?
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. Identitynumber.org will not, without your consent, ever make your personal information available to any third party, with the exception: Where our business is acquired by a third-party who agrees to our already determined privacy policy Or Where we are under legal obligation to disclose any information to law enforcement agencies around the world, either for the purposes of investigations or in order to apply our terms and legal agreements.

Third party links
Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third party products or services on our website. These third party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites. Please note that we do make use of Google Advertising on our website. When visiting our site, you will see adverts originating from Google on most pages. If you have chosen to enable Google to associate your web and app browsing history with your Google account, and to use information from your Google account to personalize ads, Google Analytics will collect Google-authenticated identifiers associated with your Google Accounts (and therefore, personal information).

Online Privacy Policy Only
This online privacy policy applies only to information collected through our website and not to information collected offline.

Your Consent
By using our site, you consent to our online privacy policy.

Changes to our Privacy Policy
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page.