Privacy notice

Who we are

Thrifty Cape Town (“Thrifty”, “we”) is a map of Cape Town’s thrift, charity and second-hand shops, run by Hack Cove. We are the responsible party for the personal information described here under the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA). Contact us about anything on this page at jacobus@hack-cove.com.

We have not yet registered an Information Officer with the Information Regulator. Until we do, privacy requests go to the address above.

If you only browse the map

You do not need an account to use the map or the directory. We do not run analytics or advertising trackers. Your browser remembers your light or dark theme choice on your own device; that never reaches us.

The site is served by Cloudflare and the map tiles by OpenFreeMap. Like any web server, theirs see your IP address and browser details when they deliver a page or tile to you.

If you sign in

You sign in with Google. Google sends us your name, email address, profile photo and an account identifier. We do not ask Google for anything else, and we never see your Google password. We keep:

• Your account: that name, email, photo and identifier, plus a display name if you choose one.
• A session cookie that keeps you signed in for up to 30 days. It is essential to signing in and is not used for tracking.
• Reviews you write: rating, text and date.
• Claims, if you ask to manage a shop: your message, and a record of the one-time code we send to the shop’s published phone number or email to check the claim.
• Shop ownership, once a claim is approved, and the changes you make to that shop’s listing.

We use this to run your account, show your reviews, decide claims and contact you about them. That is the reason we process it: you asked for an account, and these are the things an account does.

What is public

A review is public. It shows your rating, your text, the date and your chosen display name — or “A Thrifty shopper” if you have not set one. We never show your Google name, email or photo to the public. Do not put anything in a review you would not want strangers to read.

When you claim a shop, our admin sees your name and email so they can check the claim. Shop listings themselves (name, address, phone, email, hours) are compiled from public sources and are about the shop, not about you.

Who else handles it

We do not sell personal information or share it for marketing. Services that store or carry it for us: Cloudflare (hosting and database), Google (sign-in) and UploadThing (photos a shop owner uploads). Some of them process data outside South Africa.

How long we keep it, and deleting your account

We keep your account until you delete it. You can do that yourself on your account page. Deleting your account:

• Deletes your name, email, photo, display name, Google identifier, sessions, claims (with their check codes and contact records) and your shop-manager access.
• Keeps your reviews, anonymised. They stay on the shop’s page as “A Thrifty shopper”, with nothing that links them to you or to your Google account. If you want a review removed too, email jacobus@hack-cove.com and we will remove it.
• Keeps changes you made to a shop’s listing, because they are about the shop, not about you.

If you sign in with the same Google account later, you start a new, empty account.

Your rights

Under POPIA you may ask what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, and object to how we use it. Email jacobus@hack-cove.com. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) at inforegulator.org.za.

Changes

We will update this page when what we collect changes, and change the date at the top. See also our terms.