Privacy Policy

Tiny Homes SA is the trading name of Tiny Homes (Pty) Ltd. For the purposes of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA), we are the responsible party for the personal information described in this policy: we decide why and how it is processed.

• 187 Gouws Ave, Raslouw AH, Centurion, Gauteng, South Africa
• Phone: 083 660 3743 (+27 83 660 3743)
• Email: admin@tinyhomesa.com
• WhatsApp: 083 660 3743

Under POPIA the head of a private body is automatically its Information Officer. Anything raised under this policy, whether a request, a correction or a complaint, should be emailed to the address above and marked for the attention of the Information Officer.

Only what you choose to give us, plus a small amount of technical information that every website receives.

The contact page no longer carries an enquiry form. It lists our phone number, WhatsApp, email address and showroom, and points you to the quote form below, so nothing on that page collects anything from you.

Our quote form (on the quote page) asks for your full name, email address and phone number, and the delivery address for your unit: street, suburb, city, province and postal code. We need the address to price transport and to check that a truck can reach the spot. It also carries the units, sizes, extras and quantities you configured, and any notes you add.

If you contact us directly, by phone, WhatsApp, email or social media, we receive whatever you send us in that message, including your phone number or WhatsApp profile name.

Automatically, our hosting provider keeps ordinary web-server logs (IP address, browser and device type, the pages requested and when), and we use analytics as described in section 8.

We do not ask for ID numbers, banking details or any of POPIA's special personal information on this website, and we do not knowingly collect information from children. If you apply for finance or lay-bye, that application is handled by the finance provider under its own terms; it does not run through this site.

This is worth spelling out, because it is unusual. Neither form posts anything to a server or database that we control. There is no account, no login, and no saved submission on tinyhomesa.com.

• When you press send, your browser opens WhatsApp with the message already written out, addressed to our business number. Nothing is delivered until you press send inside WhatsApp, and at that point the message travels through WhatsApp's servers, like any other WhatsApp message.
• If you use the email link instead, your browser opens your own email program with the same message pre-filled and addressed to us. Your email provider sends it.
• Until you send it, what you have typed exists only in your browser tab. Close the tab and it is gone; we never see it.

Once your enquiry arrives, it lives in our WhatsApp Business account and our email mailbox. That is the record we work from, and it is what sections 6 to 11 below are about.

We use your personal information to:

• reply to your enquiry and answer your questions;
• prepare and send you a formal quotation;
• price delivery to your site, confirm access, and arrange transport and installation if you order;
• keep a record of what was quoted, agreed, delivered and invoiced; and
• meet our legal, tax and accounting obligations.

Our lawful bases under section 11 of POPIA are your consent (you choose to send us the message), the necessity of processing to conclude or carry out a contract with you, our legitimate interest in responding to people who ask us for a quote, and compliance with the law.

We do not sell, rent or trade personal information, we do not use it for automated decision-making or profiling, and we do not add quote requests to a marketing list. If we ever start sending marketing, it will be something you opt into and can opt out of at any time.

You are under no legal obligation to give us anything. Practically, though, we cannot reply without a name and a way to reach you, and we cannot quote delivery without an address, so leaving those out simply means we will have to come back and ask. Fields marked optional are genuinely optional.

If you would rather not use a form at all, phone us on 083 660 3743 and tell us only what you are comfortable sharing.

We keep the circle as small as the job allows. Depending on how you contact us and whether you order, your information may be handled by:

• Meta Platforms (WhatsApp): carries and stores any enquiry you send us over WhatsApp, under its own privacy terms;
• email providers: yours and ours, which transmit and store emailed enquiries;
• Google: usage statistics only, as described in section 8;
• our hosting provider: which serves the site and keeps standard server logs;
• transport, crane and installation contractors who receive your delivery address and a contact number, and only once you have ordered;
• finance providers: only if you ask us to refer you, and only with what you agree to share;
• our accountants, auditors or attorneys, and any authority we are legally required to give information to (SARS, a court, or the Information Regulator).

Where a third party handles personal information on our behalf, POPIA treats it as an operator and requires it to keep that information confidential and secure.

WhatsApp, Google and the email and hosting services we rely on are operated by international companies with servers outside South Africa, including in the European Union and the United States. Sending us an enquiry through those channels therefore involves a transfer of your personal information across the border, as contemplated by section 72 of POPIA.

We rely on your consent when you choose to use WhatsApp or email, and on the fact that these providers are bound by data-protection laws and contractual transfer terms that give protection substantially similar to POPIA. If you would prefer your information not to leave South Africa, phone us instead of using the quote form.

We use Google Analytics 4to understand how the site is used: how many people visit, which homes they look at, roughly where they are and which pages need work. It sets cookies in your browser and sends Google your IP address (which Google shortens before storing), your device and browser details, and the pages you view. We look at it in aggregate; we do not use it to identify individual visitors, and we have not enabled Google's advertising or remarketing features.

You can opt out at any time by blocking or deleting cookies in your browser settings, by browsing in private mode with tracking protection on, or by installing Google's Analytics opt-out browser add-on. Blocking analytics does not affect how this site works.

The contact page embeds a Google Map showing where our showroom is. Loading it tells Google your IP address and lets it set its own cookies, exactly as visiting Google Maps directly would. It is loaded lazily, so nothing reaches Google unless you scroll down to it, and you can reach us perfectly well without it: the street address is written out above the map in plain text.

Everything else on the site is served from our own domain. The videos are our own files played by your browser; there is no YouTube or Vimeo player, so watching one does not hand you over to a third party. The interactive 3D viewer runs entirely in your browser using assets hosted here, and our fonts are bundled into the site at build time rather than fetched from Google as you browse.

Apart from analytics, this site sets no cookies of its own: no advertising pixels, no cross-site tracking, no profiling. The floating WhatsApp button and the social links in the footer are ordinary links; they only pass your details to those services once you click them.

We keep enquiries and quote requests in WhatsApp and email for as long as we are dealing with you and for a reasonable period afterwards, in case you come back to us, generally no more than three years after our last contact, unless you ask us to delete it sooner or the law requires us to keep it longer.

If you buy a unit, we keep the order, delivery and invoice records for as long as South African tax and company law requires: currently five years from the end of the relevant tax period. Analytics data is retained by Google for the period configured on our property (a maximum of 14 months at event level), and server logs are kept by our host for short operational periods. When information is no longer needed, we delete it.

The strongest protection here is structural: this website holds no customer database, so there is nothing on it to breach. Beyond that, the site is served over HTTPS, access to our WhatsApp and email accounts is limited to the people who need it, and those accounts are protected with strong passwords and two-factor authentication where the provider supports it.

No method of transmitting or storing information is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a compromise affecting your personal information does occur, section 22 of POPIA requires us to notify you and the Information Regulator as soon as reasonably possible, and we will.

As a data subject you have the right to:

• access: ask whether we hold personal information about you and be given a record of it (section 23; we may charge the prescribed fee for a copy);
• correction or deletion: ask us to correct or delete information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete, misleading or unlawfully obtained, and to destroy a record we are no longer authorised to keep (section 24);
• object: object, on reasonable grounds, to us processing your information (section 11(3));
• withdraw consent: at any time, without affecting processing that was lawful before you withdrew it (section 11(2)(b));
• refuse direct marketing: and to opt out of any electronic marketing we send (section 69).

To exercise any of these, email admin@tinyhomesa.com or call 083 660 3743. Tell us what you would like us to do and enough for us to find your enquiry. We will respond as soon as reasonably possible, and normally within 30 days. The Information Regulator publishes formal request forms if you would like to use them, but a plain email is enough for us.

One practical limit worth knowing: a message you sent us on WhatsApp also exists in your own chat history and in Meta's systems. Deleting our copy does not delete theirs. For that you would need to use WhatsApp's own tools and Meta's privacy terms.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, please tell us first; we would far rather fix it. You are also entitled, at any time, to lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa):

• Woodmead North Office Park, 54 Maxwell Drive, Woodmead, Johannesburg, 2191 (postal: P.O. Box 31533, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 2017)
• Telephone: 010 023 5200 · Toll-free: 0800 017 160
• POPIA complaints: POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za
• General enquiries: enquiries@inforegulator.org.za
• Website: inforegulator.org.za

We will update this policy whenever our practices change, for example if we add a form that stores submissions, or start using a new service. The date at the top of the page always reflects the current version, and we will flag anything material here rather than changing it quietly.

Questions about this policy, or about our terms and conditions? Email admin@tinyhomesa.com or get in touch. A real person reads it.