Privacy Policy

1. Responsible Party

Under POPIA, the Protest Action Alert Network operates as the "Responsible Party" determining the purposes and means for processing your personal information.

2. The Information We Process

We only collect information that is necessary to deliver our real-time protest mapping and alert services. This includes:

Category	Specific Data Items	Legal Basis / Purpose
Account Credentials	Full name, email address, and profile picture (retrieved via Google Single Sign-On).	User authentication, login security, and user account management.
Telegram Linkage	Telegram Chat ID, Telegram username, and your custom verification code.	To authenticate and link your account to our Telegram bot to receive live mobile push notifications.
Geolocation Data	Geographic coordinates (latitude/longitude), custom saved alert locations, and regional IP lookups.	To verify region eligibility, display incident hotspots, and target notifications within your immediate vicinity.
Technical & Usage Data	IP addresses, browser headers, page-views count, and timestamp logs.	Security monitoring, abuse prevention (e.g. detecting malicious bots or false reports), and visitor metric compilation.

3. How We Process and Use Your Information

In terms of POPIA Principle 3 (Objection to Processing and Purpose Specification), we process personal information for the following specific, defined purposes:

• To maintain your secure login session and access permissions.
• To publish crowdsourced protest reports (coordinates and severity) onto the public heatmap dashboard.
• To dispatch automated alert messages to your Telegram profile when an active threat is identified near your saved coordinates.
• To prevent fraudulent registration, spamming, and malicious reporting.

4. Consent and Choice

By linking your Google account, sharing location coordinates with the Telegram bot, or submitting local alerts, you explicitly consent to the processing of your personal information for those specific purposes. You may withdraw your consent at any time by deleting your account profile, unlinking the Telegram bot, or stopping location sharing.

5. Sharing of Personal Information

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We may share anonymized, aggregated mapping metrics with researchers or public safety groups. Personal information is only disclosed:

• To third-party infrastructure providers (e.g., cloud hosts, Google OAuth APIs, Telegram API) who process data on our behalf subject to confidentiality obligations.
• When required by law, regulation, or legal process in the Republic of South Africa.

6. Information Security Safeguards

As required by Section 19 of POPIA, we employ strict technical and organizational measures to secure the integrity and confidentiality of personal information in our possession. This includes:

• Encrypting data in transit (using HTTPS/TLS) and storing credentials securely.
• Access restriction policies allowing only authorized administrators to view backend data.
• Regular monitoring of system logs to prevent and detect unauthorized intrusions.

7. Data Retention

We keep your personal information only as long as your account is active, or as needed to provide the services you requested. Technical server logs are auto-pruned on a rolling basis, and active report data is archived or anonymized when the incident status changes to resolved or resolved-spurious.

8. Your Legal Rights

Under POPIA, you have the right to:

• Request access to confirm what personal information we hold about you.
• Request correction, amendment, or deletion of incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated personal data.
• Object to the processing of your personal information on reasonable grounds.
• Lodge a complaint with the South African Information Regulator if you believe your rights have been infringed.

9. Contact the Information Regulator

The contact details of the Information Regulator (South Africa) are:
Website: https://inforegulator.org.za/
Email: enquiries@inforegulator.org.za / complaints.IR@signature.org.za

10. Contact Us

For any access requests, correction requests, or general inquiries regarding this Privacy Policy, please contact our Information Officer at:
Email: privacy@protest-action.co.za