Privacy notice

Who is responsible

Zizian (Pty) Ltd is the responsible party under POPIA for personal information processed through HerdSense. Our Information Officer is Mpho Malcom Miya. You can reach him at hello@herdsense.co.za or on +27 69 685 9393. We are based in Bethlehem, Free State, South Africa.

What we collect

When you create an account we collect your name, email address, phone number, a password (stored only as a hash), the name of your farm or community, its province, and the species you run. When you invite somebody, we collect their name, email address and the role you give them.

When you use the platform we store what you record: animals, their photographs, weights, temperatures, feed, treatments, breeding, camp moves, sales, deaths, money entries, notes, and who recorded each one. A smart tag adds position fixes, temperature, activity and battery readings for the animal it is attached to. Positions are of animals, not people, but on a small farm they show where the farm is.

On the public website we record page views with a random per-tab identifier, the page address and the referring site. We do not send your IP address from the browser; the server sees it as part of the connection. If you ask for a call back we keep the details you type into that form.

Why we use it

To run the service you signed up for: showing your records to the people in your organisation, raising alerts, generating reports and certificates, and billing you. To reach you about your account, a problem with a device, or a call back you asked for. To keep the platform secure and to find and fix faults. To count how the public site is used so we know which pages people read.

We do not sell personal information. We do not use it for advertising by other companies. We do not send marketing email unless you have asked for it, and you can stop it with one reply.

Who sees it

People in your organisation see records according to their role. A farm employee sees the animals and the records; a vet sees the herd and writes treatments; the owner sees everything including billing. On a community organisation a farmer sees their own household, and the Admin and the Chief see every household.

HerdSense support staff can read records across organisations to help you, and cannot change money, roles or policy on your behalf. Platform administrators at Zizian (Pty) Ltd have full access for operating the service.

We use hosting and storage providers to run the platform. Photographs and documents are stored with a cloud storage provider under our own account. Where a provider processes data outside South Africa, we only use one that offers protection at least equal to POPIA, as section 72 requires.

How long we keep it

For as long as your organisation has an account, plus a period afterwards so a closed account can be reopened. Deleted records are marked deleted first and removed from backups on the normal backup cycle. Records that South African law requires a business to keep, such as invoices, are kept for the period that law sets.

Your rights

Under POPIA you may ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, and object to processing. An owner can export the animal list and every record as a CSV from the dashboard at any time. To delete an account, ask the Information Officer and we will do it. If you are unhappy with how we have handled a request you may complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa).

Security

Connections to the platform are encrypted. Passwords are hashed and never stored in the clear. Every action that changes a record is written to an audit trail with who did it and when. Access to production systems is limited to the people who operate them.

Children

HerdSense is for people running farms and communities and is not directed at children. If a child's details are entered as a household member we treat them under the guidance of the adult who registered the household.

Changes

If this notice changes in a way that matters, we tell account owners by email and show the date at the top of this page.