What we keep, and why

If you run a listed place

We keep the name of your place, its address, phone number, website and Instagram if you give them, the email address we send your sign-in and confirmation links to, whether you told us your number is on WhatsApp, and the specials and photos you publish. We use these to run your page, to sign you in without a password, to ask you at most twice per special whether it is still on (and at most once before it starts, if you set it to start later), and to show diners how to reach you. Each sign-in link works once. Once you sign in, your browser keeps you signed in on that device for 30 days after you last used it, up to 90 days, or until you press Sign out, which ends that sign-in on our side as well. The operator can end a sign-in at any time.

Your specials, your place's name, address, phone number and website are public. We may also pass your specials and those public details on to partner apps and services so more people see them. Your email address is never published and never passed on. You can ask us to stop sharing at any time by email.

If we email a place we have not spoken to before, we do it once to invite it, the email says how to say no, and we do not email again when asked. A place that asks us to stop is recorded so that we keep that promise. If you reply to one of our emails, we keep your reply until it is dealt with and for up to twelve months afterwards, then delete it.

If you turn on reminders on a phone, we keep the address your browser gives us for sending notifications to that device, and the two keys that go with it. They hold no location and no name. We use them only to send you the reminder that your specials are due to be checked. Turning reminders off on that phone deletes them.

If you send us a message

The contact form keeps your name, your email address, your message and the internet address it came from. We use them to reply and to stop abuse of the form. The internet address is removed after 90 days. The message itself is kept until it is dealt with and for twelve months afterwards as a record, then deleted. The words of your message, without your name or email address, are also read by an automated spam check that a company called TypeSafe runs for us. It gives us a score that a person here sees beside the message, and nothing is deleted or refused because of the score.

If you ask us to list your place

The form for this keeps what you type: your place's name, area, phone number or address, your specials, the email address your place shows publicly and the link to the page that shows it, your own email address or WhatsApp number, and the sentence you ticked. It also keeps the internet address the request came from, to stop abuse of the form; that is removed after 2 days. While you fill the form in, what you type is kept in your own browser, on your device only. It is removed when you send it or press Start again, and it is not shown again once 7 days have passed since you last typed in the form. Sending the form makes no page and sends no email. A person here opens your link and checks that the page shows that address. If we write to you ourselves about your request, or you message us on WhatsApp about it, that message stays in our mailbox or chat like any other correspondence.

To tell a person from a script, the form counts how many seconds it was open before it was sent, and we count how many requests were turned away, without keeping them. The name of your place, your specials and anything else you typed about them are read by an automated spam check that a company called TypeSafe runs for us. The boxes for your email address, phone number, street address and link are not sent to it. It gives us a score that a person here sees beside your request, and nothing is refused or rejected because of the score.

The request itself is deleted 30 days after we approve or reject it, or after 90 days if we do neither. If we approve it, we send one email to the address your place shows, and three things are kept after the request is gone. The first is a record of the check: the name and suburb of the place, the address we wrote to, the link we checked, the sentence that was ticked, and when the request was made. The second is a record that the email was sent, with the same name, suburb and address. The third is the address itself, with the date we wrote to it and whether it asked us to stop, on a list we keep so that we do not write to it through this form a second time. That list is not cleared.

If nobody opens that email, the page we set up, which was never public, is removed 10 days after we approved the request. It is not removed by the clock if the place wrote back, so that a person reads the reply first, or if it asked us to stop, so that we keep that promise. If you open the email and publish, you run a listed place and the section above applies.

If you just look at specials

We do not ask you to sign up and we set no tracking cookies. Our analytics count the pages opened and the buttons pressed, such as Call, Directions and Share, without identifying you. On the page an owner signs in to, they also count whether that browser could receive notifications, as one of four answers and nothing else. The server and our content network see your internet address for as long as it takes to answer a page and to keep the site up. If you choose a light or dark theme, that choice is stored in your own browser and nowhere else. If you tap Near me, your browser asks you for your location and the distance to each place is worked out on your phone. Your location is never sent to us. If you share a special, it opens in your own WhatsApp or your phone's share sheet. We see that a share button was tapped, never who you sent it to.

Where it is stored

The site runs on servers in the European Union (Hetzner). Photos are stored and served by Cloudflare, which also fronts the site. Email is sent through Resend. All three are outside South Africa and each is bound by its own contract to protect what it holds. Photos are stripped of location and camera data before they are stored.

How long, and your rights

We keep a place's details while it is listed, and a record of what was published and when afterwards. A photo you remove is deleted from storage. You can ask to see what we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to stop us using it for a purpose you object to, or to stop hearing from us. Email [email protected] and we answer within a month. If you are not satisfied you can complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa at inforegulator.org.za. Our PAIA manual, which sets out how to request access to records we hold, is published at https://lefty23.co.za/paia/.