Privacy Policy

Entity

AVA Technologies ZA (Pty) Ltd

Location

Cape Town, South Africa

Information Officer

Jacques Dippenaar

Email

support@avatechnologies.co.za

Phone

+27 82 266 7188

Any question about this policy, or any request concerning your personal information, can be sent to the address above.

When you deal with us through this website, we collect:

• •Contact form submissions — your name, email address, phone number where given, and the content of your message.
• •Website chatbot conversations — the messages you send to the assistant on this site, so we can respond and improve the service.
• •Demo interactions — where you try one of our demonstration tools, the information you enter into it.
• •Technical information — IP address, browser type, pages visited and time of visit, collected automatically by our hosting provider for security and basic analytics.

We use this to respond to your enquiry, to provide and improve our services, to keep our systems secure, and to meet our legal obligations. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing.

This is the part most relevant if you have interacted with a chatbot or WhatsApp assistant that we built for another business.

When we operate an automated assistant for a client, that client is the Responsible Party under POPIA and we act as their Operator. In plain terms: it is their system, their customer relationship and their decision what happens to the information. We process it only on their documented instruction, only to run the system, and never for our own purposes.

Depending on the system, that may include your name, contact number, suburb or address, the details of your enquiry, and any photographs or documents you send to the assistant.

If you want your information corrected or deleted from one of these systems, the quickest route is to contact the business you were dealing with. You are welcome to contact us instead and we will pass the request on and assist them in responding to it.

• •Our assistants identify themselves as automated. We do not build systems that pretend to be a person.
• •Conversations are processed by third-party AI model providers in order to generate responses. Those providers act as our sub-operators and are bound by contract.
• •Automated systems can make mistakes. Information given by an assistant — including any pricing — is indicative and does not constitute a binding offer unless confirmed by the business itself.
• •You can ask to speak to a person at any point, and the assistant will hand the conversation over.
• •Where a system sends messages, replying STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE or OPT OUT stops them permanently.

We share personal information only with service providers who help us operate, and only as far as they need it. These currently include:

• •Cloud hosting and infrastructure providers.
• •AI model providers, for generating assistant responses.
• •Messaging platforms, including WhatsApp (Meta), where a service runs on that channel.
• •Email and business productivity providers.

Each is bound to process information only on our instruction and to keep it secure. We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim.

Some of our providers process information outside South Africa. Where that happens, we satisfy ourselves that the recipient is subject to laws or binding agreements that give personal information a level of protection substantially similar to POPIA, as section 72 requires. You may ask us where a particular service stores its data and we will tell you.

• •Enquiries and contact form submissions: up to 24 months from your last contact with us.
• •Website chatbot conversations: up to 12 months.
• •Information processed for a client: as instructed by that client, typically 12 months for conversations and 90 days for photographs.
• •Records we are legally required to retain, such as tax and accounting records: as long as the applicable law requires.

After these periods we delete the information or remove anything that identifies you.

We apply the security measures POPIA requires, taking account of the sensitivity of what we hold. These include encryption in transit and at rest, access controls limiting who can reach personal information, logging of access to production systems, and contractual security obligations on our providers.

If personal information under our control is accessed or acquired by an unauthorised person, we will notify the affected party and the Information Regulator as POPIA requires, and we will do so without undue delay.

Under POPIA you have the right to:

• •Ask whether we hold personal information about you, and request a copy of it.
• •Ask us to correct or delete information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, misleading or obtained unlawfully.
• •Object to our processing of your information on reasonable grounds.
• •Withdraw consent where our processing relies on it.
• •Ask not to receive direct marketing, at any time and at no cost.
• •Lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator.

To exercise any of these, email support@avatechnologies.co.za. We will respond within a reasonable period, and we may need to verify your identity first. There is no charge for a request, except that we may charge a prescribed fee for providing a copy of a record.

This site uses only the cookies necessary for it to function and to keep it secure. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, though parts of the site may then not work properly.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, please tell us first — most issues are quicker to resolve directly. You also have the right to complain to:

We update this policy as our services change. The date at the top of the page shows when it was last revised. Where a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will take reasonable steps to tell you.