Privacy notice

Privacy,in plainEnglish.

How Auxo Digital handles personal information across our website, our client work and our products. Written to satisfy South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), without hiding behind jargon. Effective 15 October 2026.

The short version
  • This notice covers all of Auxo Digital: our website, the work we do for clients, and our own products. Each product adds a short add-on with its specifics.
  • On the website we collect what you type (or say) into our forms or AI chat, the standard server logs every website keeps, and cookie-free usage statistics.
  • Analytics cookies (such as Google Analytics) load only if you accept them in the cookie banner. Marketing cookies load only if you accept those too. You can change your mind under “Cookie settings” in the footer.
  • We share personal information with our operators (service providers who act on our instructions), with SARS, our accountants and auditors where the law requires it, and with LinkedIn only if you accept marketing cookies. We never sell it.
  • Questions or requests: email our Information Officer, Jabu, at jabu@auxo.digital.
01

Who we are

We are Auxo Digital (Pty) Ltd, a software and AI company based in Johannesburg, South Africa. We run this website (https://www.auxodigital.africa), build software for our clients, and operate our own products. For everything described in this notice, we are the responsible party under POPIA and the controller under the GDPR. In short: the buck stops with us.

Company
Auxo Digital (Pty) Ltd
Registration number
2024/374541/07
Registered address
6 Hoggs Bay Close, Kyalami, Johannesburg, 1684, South Africa
General email
info@auxo.digital

When we build or run software for a client, the client usually decides what personal information goes into it. In that case the client is the responsible party, we act as its operator under a written agreement, and the client's own privacy notice applies to that information.

02

Our Information Officer

POPIA requires us to appoint an Information Officer, and we have. He is registered with the Information Regulator and is also your single point of contact for any GDPR data-subject request: one person, one address, no runaround.

Njabulo (Jabu) MthombeniInformation Officer, Auxo Digital (Pty) Ltdjabu@auxo.digitalTelephone (business hours): +27 78 239 6261
03

On our website: what we collect, and why

The contact form

WhatYour name, email address, company, and whatever you tell us about your project.

WhySo we can answer your enquiry and, if it goes somewhere, run the business relationship that follows. The form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, which processes a verification token and may set cookies or read device signals, purely to tell humans from bots, not to track you around the web. Your submission is emailed to us via Resend.

The AI chat

WhatThe messages you type or say to the AI chat on our website (the “Chat to Auxo” assistant, and the venue host on our 360° showcase).

WhyTo answer you. Your messages are sent through OpenRouter to the AI model that writes the reply. The assistant’s replies are read aloud by ElevenLabs unless you mute it, and a reply can repeat what you wrote. If you use the microphone, your browser’s own speech recognition (for example, Google in Chrome) turns your speech into text before it reaches us. Please don’t share sensitive personal information in the chat.

Usage statistics (no cookies)

WhatAnonymous, aggregated page-view statistics collected by Vercel Analytics.

WhySo we can see which pages are useful. It is cookie-free, sets no persistent identifiers, does no cross-site tracking, and cannot identify you personally. Because it sets no cookies, it runs whatever you choose in the cookie banner.

Analytics cookies (only if you accept)

WhatHow you use the site: pages visited, time on each page, the site that referred you, your device and browser type, and your approximate location based on your IP address.

WhyTo understand how the site is used and improve it. Collected by Google Analytics 4 and PostHog (and Microsoft Clarity, if we switch it on), only after you click “Accept analytics”. If you reject, or make no choice, none of these tools is loaded.

Server logs

WhatStandard hosting logs: IP address, browser user agent, pages requested. Kept by Vercel, our hosting provider.

WhyTo deliver the site over a global content delivery network, keep it secure, and diagnose faults. This is the ordinary plumbing of every website.

Your preferences

WhatYour chosen experience mode, sound setting, whether you have seen the entry gate, and your cookie choice.

WhyStored in your own browser using localStorage and sessionStorage so the site remembers how you like it. This information is not sent to Auxo.

04

Clients, service providers and product users

Clients

Where you are our client, we process your personal information in order to render services to you: names and contact details of your team, contracts, project correspondence, and billing and tax information. When we build or run software for you, we follow the written operator agreement we have with you for any personal information inside that software.

Service providers

Where you are our service provider, we process your personal information to onboard you on to our systems for operational and accounting purposes: contact details, banking details, tax and VAT numbers, contracts and invoices.

Product users

Where you use one of our products, we process your personal information to provide that product to you. What each product collects, and why, is set out in its privacy add-on below.

Giving us personal information is voluntary, but if you hold back information we need, we may not be able to provide our services or products to you. Some information (such as tax and accounting records) we must keep by law.

05

Our products

Each of our products has a short privacy add-on. It adds the product's specifics (what it collects, why, which operators it uses, and how to delete your data) to this notice, which still covers who we are, your rights and how to complain.

06

Cookies and your choice

A cookie is a small text file a website stores in your browser. When you first visit our website, you will be provided with a choice on how you'd like for us to manage your cookies; you may use this opportunity to select your preferences.

  • Analytics cookies: Google Analytics 4 and PostHog (and Microsoft Clarity, if we switch it on). These load only after you click “Accept analytics”. If you click “Reject”, or make no choice, they are never loaded and set no cookies.
  • Marketing cookies: the LinkedIn Insight Tag, which helps us show our ads to people who visited the site. If we switch it on, the banner gets a separate tick-box for it, and the tag loads only if you tick it.
  • Always on: Cloudflare Turnstile on our forms (to stop bots), and Vercel Analytics, which uses no cookies.

You can change your mind at any time. Withdrawing consent removes our analytics cookies from your browser and reloads the page.

07

What we don't do

  • No analytics or marketing cookies until you say yes, and none at all if you say no.
  • We never sell or rent personal information. To anyone.
  • Apart from SARS and others where the law requires it, and LinkedIn only if you accept marketing cookies, we do not share personal information with third parties who use it for their own purposes.
  • No automated decision-making that has a legal or similarly significant effect on you.
  • Our website and services are not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect children’s information.
  • The narration on some pages is a set of static sound files: playing it sends no personal data anywhere. (The chat assistant’s spoken replies are different; see “The AI chat” above.)
08

Our lawful bases

Under section 11 of POPIA, we process personal information with your consent (for example, analytics cookies, or WhatsApp messages you opt in to), where it is necessary to conclude or perform a contract with you (answering your enquiry, preparing a proposal, rendering services), where the law requires it (tax and accounting records), and where it serves our legitimate interests (keeping our systems secure and running) without overriding yours.

For people in the EU, EEA and UK, the matching GDPR bases are Article 6(1)(a) consent; Article 6(1)(b) contract, including steps taken at your request before entering into one; Article 6(1)(c) legal obligation; and Article 6(1)(f) legitimate interests, namely security, fault diagnosis and abuse prevention.

09

Who we share it with, and where it goes

We share personal information only with our operators (processors under the GDPR): service providers who handle it on our instructions and nothing more. Each has a written contract with us, usually its data processing agreement. Apart from them, we share information with SARS, our external accountants and auditors where tax and accounting rules require it, with others only if the law compels us to, and, if you accept marketing cookies, with LinkedIn through its Insight Tag.

Vercel Inc.Hosting for our website and products, and cookie-free usage analyticsUnited States, with a global edge network (some of our apps run in the Cape Town region)
Google (Google Cloud)Firestore databases for our products; Google Maps Places for venue search in Mema; Google Analytics 4 on our website, only after you accept analytics cookiesProduct databases in South Africa (africa-south1, Johannesburg); Maps and Analytics: United States and global
Cloudflare, Inc.R2 file storage, Turnstile bot protection on forms, and scheduled background jobs (Workers)File storage in the European Union (Western Europe); Turnstile and Workers: global network
ResendTransactional email, such as contact-form submissions and product notificationsUnited States
Meta Platforms (WhatsApp Business)WhatsApp messages you have opted in to receive from our productsUnited States and global
MicrosoftMicrosoft 365 email and office tools; Microsoft Clarity on our website, if enabled and only after you accept analytics cookiesMicrosoft cloud data centres
AnthropicAI features in our productsUnited States
OpenRouterRoutes messages you type into the AI chat on our website, and requests from AI features in our products, to the AI model that answers themUnited States
ElevenLabsTurns the website assistant's replies into speech, unless you mute itUnited States
PostHogProduct analytics on our website, only after you accept analytics cookiesEuropean Union
LinkedInLinkedIn Insight Tag for advertising, only if enabled and only after you accept marketing cookiesUnited States and global

Our product databases sit in South Africa, but several operators process information outside South Africa (mainly in the United States and the European Union). Section 72 of POPIA applies to these transfers, even to an operator. We transfer personal information outside South Africa only where the recipient is bound by a law, binding corporate rules or a binding agreement that gives it a level of protection substantially similar to POPIA, including rules on passing it on to other countries, or where another ground in section 72 applies. For GDPR purposes (Chapter V), we rely on the same agreements, which include the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses where required.

10

How long we keep it

Contact-form submissions are kept for as long as we need them to deal with your enquiry and any business relationship that follows from it, and deleted when you ask us to. Server logs are short-lived and rotate on Vercel's standard retention schedule. Your preferences sit in your own browser until you clear them (see section 12).

Client and supplier records, such as contracts, invoices and accounting records, are kept for as long as the law requires: under tax and companies law, that is generally five to seven years. Product data is kept as described in each product's add-on.

11

Your rights, and how to use them

Whether POPIA or the GDPR applies to you, your rights come down to the same set:

AccessAsk whether we hold personal information about you, and get a copy of it.
CorrectionHave inaccurate, outdated or incomplete information corrected.
DeletionHave your information deleted where we no longer have a good reason to keep it.
ObjectionObject to processing we base on legitimate interests, or withdraw consent you gave earlier.
RestrictionAsk us to pause processing while a question about it is resolved.
PortabilityReceive the information you gave us in a structured, machine-readable format.

To exercise any of them, email our Information Officer at jabu@auxo.digital and tell us what you would like done. We may need to verify that you are who you say you are: that protects you, not us. We respond without undue delay, and within one month at the outside, free of charge in almost every case. To request access to other records we hold, see our PAIA manual.

12

Preferences that live in your browser

The site remembers a few choices (your experience mode, your sound preference, whether you have already seen the entry gate, and your cookie choice) using localStorage and sessionStorage. These are notes your browser keeps to itself: they are not cookies, they are not sent to Auxo, and they contain nothing that identifies you.

To clear them, use your browser's settings to remove site data for auxodigital.africa (usually under Privacy, then “Cookies and site data”). The site will simply forget your choices, ask about cookies again, and greet you like a first-time visitor.

13

How we secure it

Section 19 of POPIA requires us to take appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal information. We do both:

Technical measures
  • Encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest.
  • Least-privilege access: people and systems get only the access they need.
  • Single sign-on on our business systems, with multi-factor authentication being rolled out.
  • Passwords and keys kept in a secrets manager, not in code or documents.
  • Audit logs of access and changes, and regular backups.
Organisational measures
  • POPIA training for our team.
  • An incident response process, including notifying you and the Information Regulator if a breach puts you at risk.
  • Written operator contracts with every service provider that processes personal information for us.
  • Confidentiality obligations in our employment and contractor agreements.

No system on earth is perfectly secure, but we treat your information the way we would want ours treated, and if a breach ever put you at risk we would notify you and the Information Regulator as POPIA (section 22) and the GDPR require.

14

If you're not happy

Talk to us first: email jabu@auxo.digital and we will do our best to put it right. You also have the right to lodge a complaint directly with a regulator:

The Information Regulator (South Africa)Email: complaints.IR@justice.gov.za · Web: inforegulator.org.za

If you are in the EU or EEA, you can complain to the supervisory authority in your own country. The European Data Protection Board keeps the full list at edpb.europa.eu. In the UK, that authority is the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

15

Our PAIA manual

Our PAIA manual, prepared under the Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000, lists the records we hold, explains how to request access to them, and gives more detail on how we process personal information. It also links the request forms.

16

Changes to this notice

If we change how we handle personal information, we will update this page and the effective date below. No silent edits, no surprise clauses. Meaningful changes to what we collect will be flagged clearly on this page.

Effective date: 15 October 2026

Question about your data? Skip the forms: just email Jabu.