This covers what Business.co.za collects about you, why, and what you can do about it. It is governed by the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).
What we always collect
If you have an account, we hold your name, email address and a hash of your password — never the password itself. While you are signed in we keep a session record so we can recognise you, and we count requests per address so the site can be defended against abuse. Decisions that affect other people — moderating a listing, approving a claim — are written to a log that we ourselves cannot edit afterwards.
None of this is optional, because the site cannot be operated safely without it. It is also the least we can hold and still function.
What we collect only if you agree
Analytics. Which pages and business profiles get looked at, and where visitors arrived from. This is what lets a business owner see how their listing is performing. If you decline, we do not issue you a visitor identifier at all — so there is nothing to join one page view to the next.
Personalisation. Connecting that activity to your account so your feed, your search results and the businesses we suggest reflect what you actually look at. Declining this does not reduce what you can use; it means the ordering is the same for everyone.
Cookies
| Cookie | Purpose | Life |
|---|---|---|
bizcoza_session | Keeps you signed in. Necessary. | 30 days |
bizcoza_consent | Remembers this choice so we stop asking. If you have an account we also store it there, so the notice does not come back on a new device or after clearing cookies. Necessary. | 400 days |
bizcoza_visitor | Anonymous identifier that ties one visit together. Only set if you accept analytics, and deleted the moment you withdraw. | 400 days |
There are no third-party cookies, no advertising trackers and no analytics service outside our own database. The site’s content security policy blocks connections to other hosts, so this is enforced rather than promised.
How long we keep it
Behavioural events are kept for 13 months and then the whole month’s partition is dropped. Aggregated counts — how many views a listing had in a month — outlive that, because they no longer describe a person. Your account data stays until you delete the account.
Sharing
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it with advertisers. A business owner sees counts and search terms for their own listing, never the identity of who visited it.
Your rights
You can see what we hold, correct it, take it with you, or have it deleted. Change or withdraw consent any time in Settings — withdrawal takes effect on the next request, and deletes the visitor identifier rather than merely stopping its use. For anything else, write to privacy@business.co.za.
If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a request, you may complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa.