Who we are

TrustedStays is a community platform where members share and discover accommodation recommendations. The operator of TrustedStays is TrustedStays. Our Information Officer is Werner Wilders, who can be reached at privacy@trustedstays.co.za. This policy explains how we handle personal information, in line with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).

What we collect

• Your account details: your name, your email address and the way you sign in.
• What you share with the community: the stays and recommendations you add, including any photos and links you give us.
• Your activity in the app: the groups you belong to, who you follow, your notifications and the support tickets you send us.
• Basic usage information, such as which pages are opened, so we can keep the app working and see what is being used.

Why we use it

• To run your account and the recommendation features you have asked for.
• To show a stay's recommender, and your own stays, to you and to the members you share groups with.
• To keep the community trustworthy: moderation, duplicate checks and answering your support tickets.
• To send you service messages about your account and the app.
• With your consent, to measure how the app is used through analytics.

Who can see what

• Other members see a recommendation credited to a first name and a last initial. Your email address is never shown to another member.
• Stays and their recommendations can be viewed publicly, not only by signed-in members: anyone who opens a stay, including through a link someone shared, sees it credited to the recommender's first name and last initial, and never to an email address.
• What is shared inside a group is visible to that group's members and its admins.
• Where the law requires it, or to deal with abuse, our administrators can access the underlying records.

Service providers

We use trusted providers for hosting and file storage, for sending email, and, where the operator has switched it on, for analytics. They process information only on our instructions. Some of them operate outside South Africa, in which case the information is transferred under the safeguards POPIA requires.

How long we keep it

Your information is kept while your account is open. When you delete a stay or a recommendation it is removed from the app, and when you ask us to close your account we delete or de-identify your personal information, unless we must keep something to meet a legal obligation.

How we protect it

Access to the database is decided by rules that run on our servers: member email addresses are never sent to a browser, and only administrators can read the full records. Passwords are handled by our authentication provider and are never visible to us.

Your rights

• Ask what personal information we hold about you, and ask for a copy of it.
• Ask us to correct information that is wrong, or delete information we no longer need.
• Object to processing, or ask us to restrict it.
• Withdraw your consent to analytics at any time: switch it off in the Analytics setting on your profile or on this page, or tell us and we will switch it off for you.
• Complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa.
• Exercise any of these rights by emailing our Information Officer at privacy@trustedstays.co.za, or through Help & support in the app.

Cookies and analytics

The app stores what it needs to keep you signed in and to remember your answer to the analytics question. Google Analytics is only loaded once you accept the "Allow analytics?" banner: if you decline, it is never loaded, and your answer is remembered on your device and, when you are signed in, on your profile. You can block cookies in your browser without losing access to the app itself.

Your analytics choice

You can change your mind at any time. Switching analytics off stops the measuring straight away, and switching it back on starts it again. Your choice is remembered on this device and, when you are signed in, on your profile, so you are not asked again elsewhere.

Children

TrustedStays is for adults. It is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly hold information about children.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes we update the date at the top of this page. If a change is significant, we will tell you in the app.