Privacy policy

MarketSafe (Pty) Ltd (registration number 2022/345330/07) runs MarketSafe and is responsible for your personal information under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). Our Information Officer is Dennis van Heerden. You’ll find our contact details on the contact page.

• Your account: the name you show other members, your email address, your cellphone number, and your password (stored only as a one-way hash, so no one can read it).
• Your ID check: the result, and the other details in section 3.
• Your listings: photos, videos, descriptions, and the town and suburb you choose. We remove hidden location data from photos before we store them.
• Your messages: kept so the chat works and so we can look into reports. Phone numbers and email addresses are hidden before a message is stored.
• What you do on MarketSafe: the listings you save, the reports you make, and when you tap Pay safely or ask to hear when it’s ready. For your sign-up, your ID check, your listings, your messages and those taps, we also note whether you used our app or our website, and we note when you last used MarketSafe.
• Your logins: the device each one is on (like “Chrome on Mac”) and when it was last used, so you can see them under Your devices and log any of them out.
• Technical details: your IP address and basic details of each request, in our security logs.

We check every member’s identity so that each account is one real person, aged 18 or older. On our verification partner’s screen, you take a photo of your ID document (a smart ID card, green ID book or passport) and a live selfie, and the partner compares your selfie with the photo in your document.

A face scan is biometric information, which POPIA treats as special personal information. We only start the check once you’ve given your consent (section 27 of POPIA). If you don’t consent, you can still browse and save listings, but you can’t list, message or report.

The verification partner works for us as an operator, under a written agreement that requires it to keep your information secure and use it only for your check (sections 20 and 21 of POPIA).

What MarketSafe keeps

• whether you passed, and the reason if you didn’t;
• how you were checked (Home Affairs or an ID document) and the partner’s reference number;
• the dates, including when you gave your consent;
• a keyed hash of your ID number: a one-way code that shows us if the same ID is used for another account, without storing the number itself.

What MarketSafe never stores

Your selfie, your Home Affairs photo, photos of your ID document, or your ID number.

• to run your account and show your listings;
• to check that members are real people with one account each;
• to deliver your messages, and hide contact details in them;
• to run our safety checks, review listings and reports, and prevent fraud;
• to send you messages about your account, like SMS codes, email confirmations and password resets;
• to count how MarketSafe is used, for example how quickly sellers answer on the app compared with the website. We look only at totals, never at what one member does;
• to keep MarketSafe secure and working, and to meet our legal duties.

We don’t use your information for advertising, we don’t send you marketing, and we never sell it.

• Other members see your name, the town and suburb on your listings, when you joined, whether you’re ID-verified, your listings, and the messages you send them. Never your phone number, email address or ID number.
• Our team sees what it needs to support you, check listings and deal with reports. We only read a conversation when we need to look into a report or suspected fraud.
• Service providers that help us run MarketSafe (hosting, storage, SMS and email delivery, and identity verification) work under written agreements that protect your information.
• The authorities, like the police or a court, when the law requires it.

With our hosting and service providers. Some of them may store information outside South Africa. When they do, we make sure it’s protected to the standard POPIA requires (section 72).

We keep personal information only for as long as we need it for the reasons in this policy, or for as long as the law requires.

When your account closes, we delete or anonymise your information, except what we still need, for example to deal with a report, a dispute or a legal claim. If an account is closed for breaking our terms, we keep the keyed hash of its ID number, so the same person can’t open a new account.

You can delete your account yourself at any time. Delete my account lists exactly what goes and what stays.

We protect your information with security measures such as encrypted connections, one-way hashed passwords, access limited to the people who need it, and logs that hide personal details. If a security breach affects your information, we’ll tell you and the Information Regulator, as POPIA requires (section 22).

We don’t use advertising or tracking cookies. When you log in, your browser keeps two login items: one in its local storage and one cookie. Cookies & storage explains them, and how to clear them.

MarketSafe is only for people aged 18 and older, and the ID check turns away anyone younger. If you think someone under 18 has an account, please tell us.

Under POPIA you can ask:

• what personal information we hold about you, and for a copy of it;
• us to correct it, or to delete it when we no longer need to keep it;
• us to stop using it in some ways (you can object).

Contact our Information Officer, Dennis van Heerden, through the contact page. We may need to confirm it’s you before we act on a request.

If you’re not happy with how we’ve handled your information, you can complain to the Information Regulator. We’d appreciate the chance to put it right first.

We’ll update this policy when the way we handle information changes. The date at the top shows the latest version, and we’ll tell you about important changes before they take effect.