1. Introduction
Welcome to Bicycle South (https://bicyclesouth.co.za). We are committed to protecting your privacy and personal information in strict accordance with the Protection of Personal Information Act, No. 4 of 2013 (POPIA) of South Africa. This policy explains how we collect, process, and protect your information when you read our travel journals, explore our digital maps, and use our regional directory.
Because we believe in a clean, open web, Bicycle South does not deploy invasive tracking networks, sell user profiles, or utilize intrusive third-party marketing cookies. If you explore our guides, your reading experience is 100% private.
2. Information We Process & How We Collect It
We strictly practice “data minimization”—meaning we only ever hold information that you explicitly and voluntarily provide to us to make the platform function.
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- Newsletter & Journal Subscriptions: When you choose to opt-in to receive our regional cycling stories, route updates, and community news, we collect your Name and Email Address. This collection is entirely voluntary and processed via an explicit double-opt-in request.
- Direct Communication: If you email us via info[at]bicyclesouth.co.za or contact our administration directly, we retain your email address and message contents exclusively to reply to your inquiry.
- Functional Site Sessions: Our filtering and directory engine (powered by FacetWP) uses basic, temporary browser sessions to remember what criteria you clicked (e.g., remembering you selected “Knysna” or “Self-Catering” on a map page) so that your results display instantly without breaking the site layout. No persistent personal identifiers are saved.
- Directory Profiles & Contributor Accounts: We store business operational details (names, public phone numbers, and physical coordinates). Where an account was historically created or claimed by a business representative, we maintain the registered user profile and baseline parameters securely in our backend database to preserve directory continuity, regardless of account activity status.
3. Privacy-First, Cookie-Free Analytics
Unlike traditional websites that use tracking scripts to profile your identity and transfer your data to overseas advertising networks, Bicycle South utilizes privacy-focused, anonymized traffic statistics via Jetpack Stats.
This analytics tool monitors aggregate website traffic trends to help us see which regional route guides and venue lists are popular. It operates entirely without individual tracking cookies, completely anonymizes visitor data on the server side, and does not store or expose personal identifiers or individual IP addresses to our administration or any third parties. Because we do not harvest personal tracking data or run behavioral advertising, our platform is legally exempt from displaying an intrusive cookie consent wall.
4. How We Safeguard Your Information
Your data security is highly important to us. We protect our platform using robust, modern administrative and technical safeguards:
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL/HTTPS) encryption across every page block to encrypt information in transit.
- Highly restricted administrative system access panels with rigorous password management protocols.
- We utilize trusted cloud providers for newsletter delivery (e.g., Mailchimp) that are fully bound by strict data processing and security provisions matching South African POPIA standards. We never trade, lease, sell, or expose your subscriber info to external commercial brokers.
5. Your Rights Under POPIA
As a South African data subject, you hold absolute rights over your personal information. At any point, you may contact our administration at info[at]bicyclesouth.co.za to:
- Request access to verify exactly what data we hold regarding your email address.
- Request immediate rectification or correction of any inaccurate data.
- Withdraw your consent or request that you be entirely deleted from our newsletter distributions and server memory.
6. Contact & Compliance Officer Details
In accordance with POPIA and the Promotion of Access to Information Act, No. 2 of 2000 (PAIA), any requests for access to records or data corrections should be directed to our designated Information Officer via email at: info [at] bicyclesouth.co.za.
Our complete, legally mandated PAIA Manual—detailing the official identity of our Information Officer, structural records, and formal request procedures—is publicly accessible and available for download here: Download PAIA Manual PDF.