Because we’re an open platform, when you write a review, the review and your profile will be visible to anyone who visits our platform. By clicking on your profile, such visitors can see your country location and all the reviews you’ve written. Similarly, if you’re a business user and reply to a review about your company, this will also be visible on our platform. So please remember that depending on the information you add to your Property Wars profile and the username you choose, you may or may not be anonymous.

Personal data is any information that relates to an identifiable individual. When you create a Property Wars user account, write a review, create a business account on behalf of your company, or otherwise use our platform, we may collect and process the following personal data about you:

Contact information: Your name and email address or any other contact details you may provide to us from time to time.

Device and location information: Your IP address, browser settings (the type of browser you use, browser language, time zone), and location.

User account information: Your username, password, photo, location and preferred language.

Business account information: Your password, your company name and domain, and certain other information you choose to add to your business profile, such as details about the type of services your company offers.

Usage and profiling information: Your Property Wars search history, how you’ve interacted with our platform, including time you spend on our site, features or functions you’ve accessed, and links you’ve clicked.

Information about reviews and ratings, including:

Which business you reviewed.

Which product you reviewed.

Whether you wrote a service review, a location review, or a product review.

Your review content and star rating.

Your product photos or videos (if you provide them together with your product review).

The location of the business you reviewed.

The dates you wrote your review, made any edits, or deleted the review.

Your reference number, order ID or similar (if you or the business provided one).

If we ask you to provide information or documentation to verify your experience, and you send us such documentation, we will collect and process the documentation for the purpose/s stated in the request.

Information about views, likes and how useful your review is for others: How many people read your review and how many people find your review “useful”. We also collect information if you click “useful” on someone else’s review.

Information about reports and replies to reviews from your business account: Your name, company details, the information you state in the reply to a review, which review you reported, the reason for the report, the date of the report.

Your verification status: Information about whether your account is verified (your verification status). Please note that we don’t collect any of your data provided to the third-party verification platform during the verification process.

Information about questions you asked on a business’s website:

Which business you asked a question.

The product you asked the question about.

The content of the question.

The date you asked the question.

The business’s response to the question.

Data provided via the “Find Reviewer” tool: Find Reviewer lets businesses reach out to reviewers to find out more information about them and their experiences. We collect the information that you decide to disclose to the business, including but not limited to your: full name, phone number, email address, and reference ID.

Preferences information: Selected preferences associated with your account, including specific consents you have given or declined, newsletters or similar email preferences and cookies containing your preferences.

Communication information: Includes communications we receive from you such as review notifications, feedback, help requests and queries via email, and other electronic communication methods, as well as metadata associated with those communications, such as time and date.

Call recordings: All inbound and outbound telephone calls made to or by Property Wars may be recorded for training, quality control and compliance purposes. Personal data (for example, name and contact details) revealed during a telephone call will be digitally recorded to deliver appropriate services.

Information from other services, including social networks: You can connect your Property Wars profile with your social media profiles, for example, Facebook (“social network”). When you do this, we automatically collect selected information about you from your social network, depending on what information you have made available on that social network and your privacy settings for sharing such information on that social network. We may collect the following information: – Name and/or username – Email address – Profile photo – Your social connections Before your request to connect your Property Wars profile with a social network profile is carried out, you’ll be told which information we will collect from that social network. You can disconnect your social network profile from your Property Wars profile via your Property Wars account at any time. Property Wars will then remove your social network unique ID, and disconnect/revoke Property Wars from your social network. However, your social network profile picture will remain on your Property Wars profile unless you change it and we will retain your name and email address.

We ask you not to share any sensitive personal documents or personal data with us, such as information revealing ethnic origin, religious beliefs, or health information, of yourself or others.

The personal data that we process is primarily collected directly from you when you provide your details to create an account with us or interact with our platform, such as by leaving reviews or posting replies to reviews.

Sometimes we’re given information about you from third parties. For example, when you sign up for a Property Wars account via Facebook, your account is automatically pre-filled with the information we receive from them. Similarly, when a business asks us to send a review invitation to you on their behalf, they give us your name, email address and a reference number, such as an order ID or similar.

We also generate or collect information from your computer or device automatically as you use our services — like your IP address, your location, or information about the device and browser you’re using to access Property Wars.

If you’ve been sent invitations to write reviews on Property Wars from businesses that use our services, or from us on their behalf, those businesses will be the data controllers responsible for those invitations and for any personal data associated with them. If you have any questions about such invitations or want to exercise your rights with regards to any data used in that context, please contact the relevant businesses directly, as we’re unable to help.

In respect to all other personal data associated with our platform, such as information you provide when you create an account, leave a review, or submit a reply, Property Wars A/S is the data controller.

Your personal data on Property Wars
We share your reviews on our platform so that others can read about your experience with a specific business. When you write a review, other users of our platform will be able to see your username, your location (country), all reviews you’ve written (including the locations and products you’ve reviewed, and your product photos or videos), and other information you have chosen to connect with your public profile. They can also see whether you’ve marked other reviews as “useful”.

Remember that if you’ve selected to use your real name as your username, this could reveal your identity. We recommend you exercise care in deciding which information to make available on our platform, and be aware that depending on the level of information provided, you may or may not be anonymous.

If you connect to a social network, information such as your profile photo, your name, birth year and approximate location will be collected from your social network profile and used to identify you on our platform. Subject to your privacy settings and the level of information available from the social network, users of our platform can use this information to identify the reviews you have written.

If you’ve chosen to preserve anonymity by not using your name for your Property Wars username, be aware that information from social networks can reveal your identity in part or in full and make it possible to identify which reviews you have written.

We show you if your social network contacts or friends have also connected with Property Wars. This is only visible to you. Other people on Property Wars cannot see your social network connections.

Your personal data on Property Wars when you create a business account on behalf of your company
When you create a business account on behalf of your company, we will disclose your company name, company address, domain, country and other information you have chosen to connect with your company’s public profile.

We recommend you exercise care in deciding which information to make available for disclosing on the website and be aware that depending on the level of information provided, you may or may not disclose personal data.

Other information provided by you on the website, including your replies to users’ reviews about your company, are also made available for other users of the website.

Your personal data on services that you connect to your Property Wars user account
If you connect your Property Wars account with your social network profile, the information and reviews provided by you, as well as data compiled by us about your use of the platform (for example, the number of reviews you have written) will be shared with and displayed in connection with your profile on the social network and will be subject to its privacy policy.

Your personal data shared with other services, websites and businesses
One of Property Wars’s main goals is to increase the exposure and availability of reviews. We therefore permit other services to show reviews created on our platform, including but not limited to, companies’ replies to reviews created on the website. This increases the potential audience and other consumers’ knowledge of Property Wars and the reviews.

The categories of third-party services and companies that can show your reviews together with your public user profile (or if you have a business account on Property Wars, your replies to reviews about your company) are:

Search engines, including Google and Bing.

Businesses you reviewed on Property Wars.

Businesses that invited you to review a product.

Consumer portals and business portals, including price comparison websites, shopping guides, etc.

Application partners and platforms, such as WordPress, Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce.

Other similar websites where, in Property Wars’s assessment, it will be relevant for users to search for reviews.

Social networks.

If you write a review on Property Wars in response to an invitation sent by a business via our review invitation services, that business will be able to match your review with their invitation.

We won’t share documentation you send us to verify your experience with the reviewed business. However, if you have a reference number, order ID or similar, we may pass that on to the business, unless you ask us not to. If you choose to provide information when replying to a message sent by a reviewed business using the Find Reviewer tool, this information will also be shared with the reviewed business.

Your personal data shared with data processors
We share your personal data with selected third parties (including Property Wars subsidiaries and other companies within the Property Wars group, and companies we work with to provide our services) that provide us with a variety of different services that support the technical operation of our platform and the delivery of our services (“data processors”). These third parties are data processors for the personal data for which we are the data controller. We have data processing agreements in place with the data processors, and it follows from these agreements that they must act solely in accordance with our instructions. By accepting this policy, you authorize us to instruct the data processors to process data in accordance with this policy and for the purposes of using the platform.

We carry out checks to ensure that data processors have taken reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect against the information being accidentally or illegally destroyed, becoming lost or deteriorating, and to protect against the information being disclosed to unauthorized persons, being misused, or in other ways being processed in violation of data protection laws.

Some of these data processors and third-party services will be located in countries outside of the one in which you are based and may have different, or less stringent, data protection standards. However, subject to the local laws in these countries, we will ensure that necessary safeguards are in place to protect your data, regardless of location. We do this through a combination of appropriate technical, organizational and administrative security measures, and by putting in place the necessary legal contracts to back up these requirements. For example, we will only transfer European users’ personal data outside the European Economic Area where a European Commission-approved method of validating the transfer has been put in place.

Other disclosures
In addition to the above, we share your personal data with the following parties and in the following circumstances:

To comply with laws or to respond to claims, legal process (including but not limited to subpoenas and court orders) and requests from public and government authorities.

To cooperate with regulatory bodies and government authorities in connection with investigations or case referrals.

To third parties in connection with the enforcement of our Terms & Conditions and Guidelines for Reviewers

To third parties in order for us to protect our operations or those of our affiliates.

To third parties to protect our rights, privacy, safety or property, and/or that of our affiliates, you or others.

To third parties in order for us to pursue available remedies, or limit damages that we may sustain.

To third parties in order for us to investigate, prevent or take action regarding suspected or actual prohibited activities, including but not limited to fraud and misuse of our platform.

To third parties in the event of any reorganization, merger, acquisition, sale, joint venture, assignment, transfer or other disposition of all or any portion of our business or assets (including in connection with any bankruptcy or similar proceedings).

We only keep your data for as long as we need it, or are required to for legal reasons. This depends on why it was collected, and if we have a continuing legal basis to do so (such as to fulfil a contract between us, perform a service you requested, meet legal requirements, or for our legitimate interests). When we no longer have a valid reason to keep your data, we’ll either delete it or anonymize it so that it doesn’t identify you. We treat data differently depending on what it’s used for, but you can delete your personal data or ask us to do that for you at any time (see ‘Your rights’ below).

Personal data you provide, including your reviews, is kept for as long as you have a Property Wars account, or as needed to provide you with our services. If you choose to delete your user account, we will save a log with the following information: your name, email address and the date of the deletion of your account. We will keep the log for three years. In some cases, even if you delete your Property Wars account, we retain certain information we are required by law or have compelling legitimate interests to keep. Reasons we might retain some data for longer periods of time include (but are not limited to) security, fraud and platform abuse prevention, complying with legal or regulatory requirements, and defending our legitimate business interests.

Personal data we receive from companies that use our automated services to send a review invitation to you on their behalf is kept for three years.

Keeping your personal data secure is our highest priority. We use various organizational, technical and administrative measures to protect your personal data within our organization and we regularly audit our system for vulnerabilities. However, since the internet is not a completely secure environment, we can’t ensure or warrant the security of the information you transmit to us. Emails sent via the platform may not be encrypted, and we therefore advise you not to include any confidential information in your emails to us.

We use cookies and similar technologies to help deliver, optimize, personalize and analyze our services, and for advertising purposes.

We use a combination of cookies and other technologies, such as pixels and tracking codes, to collect information for use in line with the purposes set out in this policy.

What’s a cookie?
A cookie is a small text file that is stored on your computer or device, via your web browser, at the request of the websites you visit or applications you use. Cookies record things like your preferences and settings, which help give us the information we need to provide you with the most consistent and relevant experience. We also use cookies to record information about experiments or new improvements we might test to track how you use our services and find out whether they were effective.

Cookies on our website may be set by us, third parties we’re working with, or independent third parties, such as advertisers.

What are pixels?
Pixels are small, transparent image files inside a web page or email. We use them to understand how you interact with our services.

What are tracking codes?
Tracking codes are snippets of code placed in the page to measure things like visits and interactions. We use tracking codes to find out more about how you interact with our services, the adverts you see and more generally, how you use our platform.

Please see our Cookie Policy for more information and details of the types of cookies and similar technologies we use.

If you’ve got a Property Wars user account, you can access, edit, download or delete the key personal data associated with your profile at any time by logging into your account. From here you can also manage your email subscription preferences.

You also have rights in relation to the personal data we have about you. These rights may be limited, for example, if fulfilling your request would reveal personal data about another person, or if you ask us to delete information which we are required by law, or have compelling legitimate interests, to keep. If you have unresolved concerns, you have the right to complain to a data protection authority. For more information about how to do that, please see the Contact us here.

Access and download your personal data
If you have a Property Wars user account, you can log in to see and download information related to your account, including your reviews. For more information about how to do that, please see the Contact us here.

If you have a business account on Property Wars, or if you don’t have an account at all, you can email privacy@propertywars.co.za and request information about your personal data.

Correction and deletion of your personal data
If any of the personal data we have about you is incorrect or misleading, if your personal data changes or if you no longer wish to appear on the platform, you can correct, edit or delete the information yourself via your Property Wars user account. Otherwise, you are welcome to email privacy@propertywars.co.za requesting to correct or delete your information.

See ‘How long do we store your personal data?’ for more information on deleting your data.

Other rights
In addition to the rights set out above concerning your personal data, you also have the right to object to the processing of your personal data, and the right to have the processing of your personal data restricted (in particular, where we don’t have to process the data to meet a contractual or other legal requirement, for example the processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes).

Where we have asked for your consent, you may withdraw your consent at any time. You may withdraw your consent either by using the functionality provided within the appropriate product feature or by contacting us (see ‘Contact us’ below). If you ask to withdraw your consent to Property Wars processing your data, this will not affect any processing which has already taken place at that time.

Our platform is not directed to children under the age of 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from such children. If you become aware that a child under the age of 16 has provided us with their personal data, please contact us using the contact information provided below.

We may change this policy from time to time. Laws, regulations, and industry standards evolve, which may make those changes necessary, or we may make changes to our services or business. We will post the changes to this page and encourage you to review our Privacy Policy to stay informed.

If we make changes that materially alter your privacy rights, we will provide additional notice, such as via email or through our platform. Your continued use of our platform or services after we publish or send a notice about the changes to the policy will mean that you accept and agree to the updated policy.

We aim to make this information as clear and transparent as possible. But if you still have questions about how we process your personal data, or would like to exercise your rights under our policy, you’re welcome to contact our Data Protection Officer at privacy@propertywars.com.