Privacy notice
What e-halisi collects, why, how long we keep it, and your rights under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). Last updated 9 October 2026.
Who we are
e-halisi keeps a dated photo record of vehicles hired out to e-hailing drivers, and runs a members-only community for owners and drivers. We are not a party to any hire: owners and drivers agree their own terms, and nothing on e-halisi is a payment, a loan or an offer of employment.
The responsible party is [To be completed: registered name of the entity], registration number [To be completed: company registration number], of [To be completed: physical and postal address].
Our Information Officer is [To be completed: Information Officer's name], registered with the Information Regulator under [To be completed: registration number], and can be reached at [email protected]. Our PAIA manual (how to request records under the Promotion of Access to Information Act) is available [To be completed: link to the PAIA manual, or "on request from [email protected]"].
What we collect and why
| What | Why | Required? | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account details (name, email, phone) | To sign you in and contact you about your account. | Email is required to sign in. Name and phone are asked for at registration. | While your account is open. |
| Identity profile (ID and licence details, documents, profile photo) | So owners and drivers can see what is on file before a hire. ID and licence numbers are encrypted. | Voluntary, but some features ask for a complete profile first. | While your account is open; documents deleted on request. |
| Vehicle photos and weekly checks | To keep the vehicle's condition record and compare each week with the handover. | Required for a weekly check. | 24 months after the placement ends. A check that had to start again: 90 days. |
| Photo details: time, camera information and location | To check that a set of photos was taken at one time and place (see below). | Location is voluntary; a check without it is marked “location unknown”. | With the photo it belongs to. |
| Community posts, comments, messages, reviews | To run the community and keep it safe. | Voluntary. | Until deleted, or the account closes. |
| How you appear in the community: a username, whether your profile photo shows, and which name your hire card carries | So other members see you the way you chose — your name or a username; your photo only if you switched it on; and on your advertised hire card, your name or your username. | Voluntary. Your name is shown until you choose a username; the photo is off until you switch it on; the hire card shows your name unless you choose otherwise. | While your account is open. A username you give up is held for 90 days. |
| Topics you hid or reported in “What’s happening” | So a trend you said you are not interested in, or reported, stays off your panel; reports also help us keep trends safe. | Voluntary. | While your account is open. |
| Moderation records | Decisions on reported or held content, kept to apply the guidelines fairly and improve our checks. | Follows from posting. | As long as needed to apply the community guidelines. |
| Help and report requests, with any screenshots | To answer you and fix what went wrong. | Voluntary; an email address is needed for us to answer. | 24 months after the last message. A request waiting on you for 30 days is closed. Screenshots never sent are deleted after a day. |
| Analytics | To see which pages are used, from which kinds of device, so we can improve them. | Voluntary: only with your consent. | 13 months. |
| Security signals | To spot shared, fake or taken-over accounts. | Voluntary: only with your consent. | 13 months. |
| Your cookie choices | Proof of what you agreed to, and when (with a scrambled form of your network address). | Recorded when you answer the cookie notice. | 13 months. |
Backups. The database is backed up every night and each backup is kept 30 days, so information we delete is gone from backups within 30 days. Photos are not in the backups; they are deleted directly.
Photo details and location
A photo taken for a weekly check keeps the information your phone records with it: the time, the camera, and — if your phone shares it — where it was taken. We also note the time and place the check was started. We use these to make sure a check is genuine: that it was finished on the same day and in the same place, and that a photo was not reused from an earlier week. They are kept with the photo and deleted with it.
People in the background of photos
Weekly checks are of vehicles, not people. When a person or another vehicle appears in a photo, we blur faces and bystanders and mask number plates in every copy anyone sees. The unblurred original is kept privately, only for the automatic integrity checks.
Automatic decisions, and asking a person
Some things on e-halisi are decided by software first. None of them is final, and you can always ask for a person to look:
- The photo check turns away a photo on the spot when it is too dark, reused, not of a vehicle, the wrong angle, or of a different vehicle, and asks you to take it again.
- The integrity score on each weekly check notes things like a reused photo, a time that doesn't fit, or an unlikely odometer reading. It is shown to the vehicle's owner as a flag to look at, never as a finding against anyone.
- Community moderation can hold a post, comment or message until a person has reviewed it. A hold is not a decision; a person makes the decision.
To ask for a person to review any of these, use Report a problem or email [email protected]. A moderation penalty can also be appealed.
Who sees your information
Other members see only what a card or post shows them; phone numbers are shared only between an owner and a driver on a shortlisted enquiry, as each agreed. We do not sell personal information.
In the community (posts, comments, messages, your member card) you choose whether members see your name or a username you pick. If you use a username, you can also choose to show it on your hire card where the card is advertised (the feed, search, the browse pages and your listing page). Anything that is part of a hire — an enquiry, a placement, the weekly-check record, a public card you switched on — always shows your name. Your profile photo, collected for the fleet owner you are linked to, appears in the community only after you switch it on there, which we record as a consent of its own; switch it off and it stops showing at once.
We use service providers to run e-halisi, under agreements that limit them to that work:
- Our server: [To be completed: hosting provider and country].
- Cloudflare (United States, with data centres worldwide): our website's network, file storage for photos, documents and backups, and forwarding of email sent to our addresses.
- Resend (sending from the European Union): the emails we send you.
- Sentry (United States): error reports when something breaks, with personal details removed as far as possible.
- Google Gmail (United States): email you send to support@, report@ or privacy@ is forwarded to our Gmail inbox, where we read and answer it.
Some of these process information outside South Africa. We use them because they are bound by agreements, or laws, giving protection comparable to POPIA (POPIA section 72).
Our photo and moderation checks run on our own server using openly published models, which we download from Hugging Face. Nothing about you is sent to Hugging Face to do this.
We do not send community posts or messages to any outside service for moderation. If we ever decide to use one (for example an AI service to help review reported posts), we will update this notice first and say who it is and where — and it will not start before then.
Your rights
You may ask to see the personal information we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, object to how it is used, and withdraw consent you gave. Send a data request from Report a problem or email [email protected]. We confirm it is you before acting, and answer within 30 days. Some records about a hire are also the other person's record (for example an owner's weekly checks of their own vehicle); when you ask us to delete your account, we remove your details from those records rather than delete them.
If you are unhappy with how we handled your information, you may complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa): [email protected].