Privacy Policy

findproperly is a service of Haple IO (Pty) Ltd, a company registered in South Africa (registration number 2024/547503/07) at Cabernet Villas, 0 Cabernet Sauvignon Street, Oude Westhof, Bellville, 7530. For the purposes of the Protection of Personal Information Act, 4 of 2013 (POPIA), we are the responsible party for the personal information described here.

Requests about your own personal information go to our Information Officer, Arnoe de Vries, at arnoe@haple.io, or through the contact form. Say in the message that it is a POPIA request so it is handled as one.

This policy covers findproperly.co.za and the findproperly application. It does not cover other sites we link to, and it sits alongside our terms of service.

When you sign in

Signing in happens through Google and nothing else. What we keep from it is your account identifier (a stable number that identifies you to us), your name, your email address and your profile picture. That is the whole of it. You never create a password with us and we never see your Google password. We do not read your Gmail, contacts, calendar or files, and we do not ask Google for permission to.

The account identifier is what ties your saved properties to you. There is no separate user record: your identity is the Google account, which is also why losing access to it means losing access to your library.

When you pay

We hold a billing record: which plan you are on, whether the subscription is active, the dates of the current period, how much of the monthly allowance you have used, your prepaid credit balance, and Paystack's references for your customer and subscription records. We also keep a reusable card token from Paystack, which lets us charge the same card for a top-up without sending you through checkout again.

Card numbers, expiry dates and CVV numbers never reach findproperly. They are entered on Paystack's own checkout. The token we hold is useless anywhere except our Paystack account.

When you use the product

• the address you searched and the property the registry matched it to,
• the reason you gave for the search, chosen from a fixed list — listing appraisal, buyer due diligence, seller mandate, valuation, or other. Your most recent choice is kept against your membership so the field starts on it next time,
• the report that came back, and the images that came with it,
• which deeds documents you checked for availability, and any copy you ordered,
• a ledger row for every billed action, recording what was bought and what it cost us,
• when you last opened the Properties page, which is how the "new since you last looked" counter works,
• your conversations with the assistant, if it is open to your account. It is closed at present.

When you write to us

The contact form collects your name, email address, your company or agency if you name one, and your message. Alongside it we record your browser's user agent string and a one-way hash of your IP address. We store the hash rather than the address itself, because the hash is enough to rate-limit the form and to spot the same sender submitting repeatedly, and holding raw IP addresses would make that table something worth attacking.

We use what you send to answer you and to keep the form from being abused, and nothing else. It is not added to a mailing list, and it is not shared with anyone outside Haple IO (Pty) Ltd.

Most of the personal information that passes through findproperly is not about our customers. A deeds report names the registered owner of a property and sets out the transfer history with prices and dates, the bonds and endorsements registered against it, and the deeds office references for each. Those people are not our customers, did not come to us, and in most cases will never know a report was pulled.

The source is the South African deeds registry, retrieved through LexisNexis WinDeed under a paid account. The registry is a public register: the Deeds Registries Act makes its records open to inspection on payment of the prescribed fee, and a deeds search is ordinary practice in property work.

Identity numbers are withheld

WinDeed returns a natural person's identity number in full. findproperly does not show it. A South African identity number is not only an identifier: the first six digits are a date of birth, and the rest carries gender and citizenship. Nothing the product does needs it, because the owner's name and the document number already answer who owns what.

The number arrives inside the supplier's response and is stripped from everything the product displays and from everything it sends to a browser. The setting that would reveal it is closed by default, so an unset or mistyped configuration hides the number rather than publishing it.

POPIA requires a lawful ground for every purpose. Ours are:

• Running your account and delivering the reports you ask for. Necessary to perform our contract with you.
• Taking payment and keeping the records of it is necessary to perform that same contract, and the accounting records are ones South African law obliges us to keep.
• Retrieving and storing deeds information about property owners rests on our legitimate interests and yours in carrying out lawful property due diligence, drawing on a public register that exists to be inspected. Withholding identity numbers is how we hold that processing to what the work actually needs.
• Recording the reason for each search, and keeping it, is necessary to comply with our agreement with LexisNexis and to show that searches were made for a lawful purpose. A fixed list rather than free text is how we keep that record to what is needed.
• Answering what you send through the contact form rests on your consent, given when you tick the box on that form. You can withdraw it by asking us to delete the message.
• Measuring how the site is used, and which adverts bring people to it, rests on your consent, given on the cookie banner. Decline it and neither measurement happens; you can change your answer at any time on this page.
• Keeping the service secure and the form free of abuse: our legitimate interests.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not profile you to decide anything about you automatically. We advertise findproperly on Google, and if you accepted advertising cookies we tell Google Ads when a visit that came from one of our adverts leads to a sign-up or a purchase — that is measurement of our own advertising, described under who processes it, not the sharing of your information for anyone else's.

POPIA calls a supplier that processes personal information for us an operator. Ours are:

• LexisNexis WinDeed retrieves deeds data. We send the address or property identifiers being searched, and a reference saying whose enquiry it is: our own account name, or, where that setting is enabled, the identifier of the organisation the search was made in. That identifier is a random value and carries no name. We receive the report. The reason recorded for a search is not sent with it. Our agreement with LexisNexis requires us to hold a lawful reason for each enquiry and to produce it if they audit us, so we record it and would disclose it on such a request.
• Paystack processes card payments and subscriptions. It receives the name, email address and card details you enter at checkout.
• Google provides sign-in, and Google Maps Platform receives the address text typed into the search box so it can suggest and locate places.
• Google Analytics measures how the site is used, and only if you accept it. It receives the pages you open, the device and browser you open them in, the country and city your network resolves to, and a record of the purchases you make — the amount, the currency, and whether it was a plan, a credit pack or a single report. It does not receive your name, your email address, the addresses you search for, or anything from a deeds report.
• Google Ads measures our own advertising, and only if you accept advertising cookies. It receives a record of the click that brought you here and whether that visit led to a sign-up or a purchase. When you create an account after clicking one of our adverts, it also receives a one-way hash of your email address, so Google can match the sign-up to the advert; the address itself is not sent. Decline, and none of this happens — the adverts still show, we just cannot tell which of them worked.
• Supabase hosts the Postgres database everything is stored in.
• Vercel hosts and serves the application.
• Anthropic would process conversation content if the assistant were open to your account. It is closed at present, so nothing is being sent.

Each of them is bound to process only on our instructions. We also disclose information where the law requires it, for example on a valid court order or a lawful request from a regulator.

There is no data broker in that list, and nothing on this site is used to build an advertising audience or to personalise anyone else's advertisements. The one advertiser involved is us: Google Ads appears above because we advertise findproperly and, with your consent, measure whether those adverts work.

A solo account is a single seat, and its library belongs to it alone — no one else sees what you pull. Where you use findproperly as part of an organisation, the library belongs to the firm instead. Every member of the organisation can see every report the organisation holds, including reports you pulled and reports pulled before you joined, and including members with the Billing role whose job is the invoice rather than the property work.

That is a deliberate design, and it widens who sees information about property owners. This applies to any member the organisation invites, including an outside bookkeeper. Your own name and email address are visible to your organisation's Admin, along with which reports you spent the firm's credits on, and removing a member ends their access immediately.

findproperly sets three cookies of its own regardless of the choice you make below. None of them is an analytics or advertising cookie.

• a session cookie, set when you sign in and holding the signed token that identifies you on each request,
• short-lived cookies used during the Google sign-in exchange, which protect that exchange against request forgery and are discarded once it completes,
• a cookie recording your cookie choice, set when you answer the banner and kept for a year, so you are not asked again. It holds your answer and nothing else.

Analytics and advertising cookies are set only if you accept them. Accepting lets Google Analytics set its own cookies to recognise your browser between visits, lets Google Ads do the same to measure our advertising, and lets findproperly set one further cookie of its own: if you arrived by clicking one of our Google adverts, the click's identifier is kept for up to 90 days so a later sign-up or purchase can be matched to the advert that led to it. Declining sets none of these, and the Google Analytics and Google Ads tags are not loaded at all. If you arrived by clicking one of our Google adverts, they still load until you decide, but run without any identifier unless you accept. You are asked before anything is set, and you can change your answer at any time using the link below.

Your light or dark theme preference is kept in your browser's local storage. It never reaches us.

The place you pick on one of our search pages is saved in your browser's session storage so the map can open on it. The map uses it once, and only if it is under ten minutes old. It is removed when the map reads it or when you close the tab, and it never leaves your browser.

There are no third-party advertising trackers on this site beyond the Google Ads measurement described above, and none at all if you decline. Google sets its own cookies on its sign-in pages, which are Google's and governed by Google's privacy policy.

The database is hosted by Supabase, in its eu-west-1 region (Ireland). The application runs on Vercel, in its default iad1 region (Washington, D.C., United States).

Some of the operators listed above process personal information outside South Africa. POPIA allows a cross-border transfer where the recipient is subject to a law, binding rules or an agreement giving protection comparable to POPIA's own conditions, and we rely on our contracts with those providers for that. Paystack processes on AWS infrastructure with servers in Ireland, per its own Privacy & Cookie Policy. Google does not commit to a fixed processing location for Google Maps Platform or Google Sign-In; it relies on its Data Transfer Framework, built on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses, to safeguard transfers wherever processing happens.

• Your library is kept while your account, or your organisation, is active.
• A lapsed organisation's library is locked rather than deleted, so it can be restored if the subscription is. Nothing is destroyed on a failed payment.
• The reason recorded for a search is kept with the property it belongs to, for as long as that property is kept, because it is the record we would have to produce if LexisNexis audited the enquiry. Your most recent choice is kept against your membership until you change it, and goes when the membership does.
• A completed property report is kept for as long as your library is, together with its images and any document copies you ordered against it. It is not deleted individually. An unfinished search — one that has not yet returned a report — can be discarded, and whatever was stored with it goes at the same time. If a charge was already made, the ledger row survives with the link to the property removed, because the charge happened and we have to be able to account for it. To ask that a completed report be removed, see Your rights below, or contact us as described in Contacting us.
• Billing and tax records are kept for the period South African tax and company law requires: seven years, per section 24 of the Companies Act, 71 of 2008.
• We keep contact form submissions for 12 months from the day you send them, then delete them.
• Once an account is closed, the remaining records are deleted after 12 months, apart from anything we are obliged to keep.

• Sign-in is delegated to Google, so we store no password and cannot leak one. Two-factor authentication on your Google account protects your findproperly account too, and we recommend turning it on.
• Card details are never held by us.
• Owner identity numbers are withheld by default and never sent to a browser.
• The contact form stores a hash of the sender's IP address rather than the address.
• Traffic to the site and to the database is encrypted in transit.

No service is immune. If a security compromise affects your personal information, POPIA requires us to notify the Information Regulator and the people affected, and we will do that as soon as we reasonably can after establishing what happened.

Under POPIA you may:

• ask what personal information we hold about you and be given a copy,
• ask us to correct anything inaccurate, or delete anything we no longer need,
• object to processing we base on legitimate interests,
• withdraw consent you have given, which does not undo processing already done,
• complain to the Information Regulator.

Write to our Information Officer at arnoe@haple.io. We will answer within a reasonable time. A formal access request under the Promotion of Access to Information Act has a prescribed form and may carry a prescribed fee, and we will tell you if that applies to what you have asked for.

If you are named in a report

Property owners have these rights too, and they do not depend on being our customer. You can ask what we hold about you and ask us to correct it. What we cannot do is change the deeds registry: an error in the underlying record has to be corrected through the Registrar of Deeds, and until it is, that is what the registry will keep returning to anyone who searches it.

The supervisory authority for POPIA is the Information Regulator (South Africa). You can complain to it if you think we have handled your personal information unlawfully, and you can do that whether or not you have raised it with us first.

The Regulator publishes its current contact details and its complaint forms at inforegulator.org.za.

We update this policy when what we do with personal information changes, for example when a new operator is added. The date at the top of the page says when it last changed. Where a change materially affects you, we will tell you by email or in the product rather than leaving you to notice the date.

Haple IO (Pty) Ltd, trading as findproperly.

• Registered address: Cabernet Villas, 0 Cabernet Sauvignon Street, Oude Westhof, Bellville, 7530
• Information Officer: Arnoe de Vries
• Email: arnoe@haple.io

For anything that is not about personal information, the contact form is the quickest route, and the terms of service cover billing, credits and refunds.