Privacy, and the small amount of data we hold

The two people who write this site are jointly responsible for anything you send us. There is no third party processing your information on our behalf, no agency, no marketing contractor and nobody in another country holding a copy. If you want to know what we have about you, phone the number on the contact page and ask; you will get the answer from one of the two people who actually has it.

Because there is no company structure, there is also no compliance department to hide behind. That cuts both ways, and we think it mostly favours you.

From the form: the name you give, a phone number, a contact address, the subject line and the message itself. From a phone call: whatever you tell us, plus a note of what you asked for so we can pick the conversation back up. Nothing else. We do not ask for an identity number, a residential address, a payment card or anything about your financial position, and if you volunteer any of that we will ask you to stop.

The server that hosts these pages keeps standard technical logs of requests, as every web server does, and those are rotated and overwritten in the normal course of running the machine. We do not read them, analyse them or connect them to anything you have sent us.

One purpose: answering you. The basis is your consent, which you give by ticking the box on the form or by phoning us and asking a question, and which you can withdraw at any time by telling us so. If you book one of the jobs on the price list, we hold the same details for as long as the job runs plus whatever period is needed to settle the invoice.

We never use your details to send you anything you did not ask for. There is no mailing list on this site, no newsletter and no plan to start one. Nobody will be contacted again about a show that has already happened.

Twelve months at the outside, and usually a great deal less. A form enquiry that has been answered and closed is deleted at the next clear-out, which happens every few weeks. A booked job keeps its notes until the work is done and paid for, and then they go the same way.

If you want your details gone sooner, say so and we will delete them while you are on the phone and tell you it is done. We will not keep a record of the deletion request itself beyond the call, because keeping a record of a deletion rather defeats the point.

Nobody, in the ordinary course. We do not sell, rent, share, swap or publish your information. We do not pass enquiries to dealers, stands, importers, insurers or workshops, and the fact that we take no commission from any of them is precisely why there is no reason to.

There are two narrow exceptions. If an independent workshop is doing an inspection you have booked, you give them your own details directly and we do not act as a conduit. And if a court or a lawful authority compelled disclosure, we would comply, having first told you unless the law forbade that.

You may ask what we hold, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, and withdraw your consent to us holding it. You may also object to the way we are processing it. All of that goes through the phone number or the form on the contact page, and we answer such requests ahead of ordinary enquiries.

If our answer does not satisfy you, you may take the matter to the national Information Regulator, which handles complaints about personal information in South Africa. We will give you the current contact route for that body if you ask, rather than printing details here that may go out of date.

The pages are served over an encrypted connection and the devices we work on carry full-disk encryption and a passcode. Form submissions reach us as notifications and are deleted from the device once they have been dealt with. That is a reasonable standard for a two-person site and we are not going to dress it up as something grander.

What it is not is a guarantee. No small site can promise that nothing will ever go wrong, so please use your judgement about what you put in a message box. If a matter is genuinely sensitive, phone us instead and nothing gets written down at all.