These guidelines are just that: guiding principles. Please understand that we have the final say with regard to the interpretation and application of these guidelines, and we can update them at any time. If you’d like more detailed information about how we work, you’re welcome to visit our Support Centre.
We’re all for freedom of expression, but some content just won’t fly. We can delete a company reply that breaches these guidelines. And if you misuse our platform we can block access to or suspend features in your business account, place a consumer alert on your profile, and potentially even terminate agreements you have with us.
We don’t moderate reviews, but everyone can flag reviews that breach our guidelines. You can use your business account to flag reviews for different reasons (not liking a review is not one of them!) and we only assess a review for the chosen reason.
If a flagged review breaches our guidelines and the problem can be fixed, the reviewer will be given the opportunity to change it. The review might be temporarily hidden during this process. If the problem isn’t resolved or it can’t be resolved, then the review will usually stay offline.
If you flag reviews, be fair and consistent — that means flagging 5-star reviews for the same reasons you flag 1-star reviews. We’ll display a public version of your report, so that everyone can see why you’ve flagged the review. For transparency, all your flagging activity is also publicly visible via your business profile page.
A review is owned by the person who wrote it. They can edit or delete their reviews at any time, and can write more than one review if they’ve had more than one experience with your business. But they don’t have to update their review if things change — like if you give them a refund. Pressuring a reviewer or offering them an incentive to change or delete their review is a big no-no
Claim your profile and get a business account. You can use it to send invitations, reply to reviewers and flag reviews that breach our guidelines. The information shown on your business profile page must be correct and not misleading.
We’re a platform that sits between clients and businesses, so we have to balance competing responsibilities: We want to let everyone tell their story (good or bad), but we’re also required to take down words and statements that are likely to cause serious harm to someone’s reputation or serious financial loss to a business. That’s why you can flag reviews that are defamatory.
But remember, just because a review is negative, that doesn’t mean it’s defamatory.
We won’t remove a review just because you think it’s unfair, you don’t agree with its content or you think the reviewer should have left you more stars. We don’t get involved in disputes about what actually went down between a reviewer and a business. Property Wars is a consumer review platform, not a regulatory authority or a court of law.
We want the privacy and safety of everyone to be respected and protected, so don’t post any sensitive or personal information. We’re talking names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and anything else that could be used to track, identify, contact or impersonate someone.
If your employees decide to use their own name in replies to reviews, then they’ve put that information out there and you shouldn’t flag other reviews for including that same name.
We expect you to be a respectful contributor to our platform. So play nice. Don’t post anything harmful, hateful, discriminatory, defamatory or obscene. And don’t lie, bully, blackmail, make threats or do anything illegal.
Here are our tips for replying to reviewers.
We give reviewers the freedom to choose their own username, so you might not always recognize their name as a customer of yours. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t had a genuine, recent experience with your company. If you want more information, try engaging with the reviewer.
And if that doesn’t work, you can ask us to try to verify the reviewer’s experience.
Don’t write or ask people to write fake reviews. We have zero tolerance for fake reviews and will remove them.
If you’re asking for reviews, your invitation process and language should be fair, neutral and unbiased. It’s possible to ask reviewers to provide a reference number when they leave a review, to help identify an experience.
You shouldn’t provide incentives like discounts, monetary rewards, loyalty points, gifts, coupons, referral bonuses and the like when asking for reviews.
Reviews can’t be collected on company premises without our prior permission. And you can’t ask customers to use your equipment (for example, an iPad) to review your company.
People who have had a recent, genuine experience with your business can write a review about it. Bear in mind that an experience doesn’t necessarily mean a purchase — it could be, for example, a phone call, an online order, a visit to a store or otherwise using your company’s product/service.
But anyone with a conflict of interest cannot write a review of your business — this includes you, your employees and your immediate family members. It also means you and your employees can’t review a competitor. This is to protect the integrity of reviews.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 may use your personal data to:
Provide our services to you, including displaying your reviews and giving you access to your user account and our platform, or providing you with access to your company’s business account and our website.
Identify you as a registered user when you log into our platform and revisit our platform.
Improve our platform and services.
Respond to your questions and provide customer service.
Send you our newsletters.
Engage in various internal business purposes, such as data analysis, audits, fraud monitoring and prevention, developing new products and services, improving or modifying our platform and our services, including our TrustBoxes, identifying usage trends, determining the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns and operating and expanding our business activities.
Train our staff and for quality control purposes, helping us improve the quality of our services.
Exercise or comply with our own legal rights or obligations in connection with legal claims, or for compliance, regulatory and auditing purposes, where necessary. For example, we may retain information where we are required by law, or if we are compelled to do so by a court order or regulatory body.
If you have a Property Wars user account, we may also use your personal data to:
Verify the authenticity of your reviews.
Invite you to leave more reviews.
Pass on a message from the business you reviewed or the business that invited you to review a service experience or a product via our platform.
Contact you if your review is flagged by businesses or other users and, if necessary, ask you to provide documentation to verify your review or experience.
Contact you by email to tell you how many times your review was read and whether other users find your review useful, or otherwise provide feedback concerning your user account or your review.
Facilitate the social sharing function, including giving you the option to connect with members of your network who are both users of Property Wars and users of one or more social networks.
Display which members of your social networks are also users of Property Wars in order to increase confidence in reviews and to create a better user experience on our platform.
Enforce our Terms & Conditions.
If you have a business account on behalf of your company on Property Wars, we’ll also use your personal data to:
Notify you about a review of your company or products you offer.
Verify the legitimacy of your replies to reviews.
Inform you when users provide feedback concerning your reply to a review or your report of a review.
Enforce our Terms & Conditions.
We may also use the information in other ways for which we provide specific notice at the time of collection.
We need to process your personal data to:
Perform our contract with you or your company.
Exercise and comply with our own legal rights and obligations and operate an online review platform in compliance with applicable legal acts.
Pursue legitimate business interests related to operating our website and providing our services to you. Where we process your personal data based on a legitimate interest we will only do so where the processing is relevant, adequate and limited to what is necessary for the purpose it was collected for. And of course, we’ll always ensure our legitimate interests don’t unfairly impact on your own rights and freedoms.
Establish, exercise or defend legal claims, where necessary.
In circumstances where you have expressly given your consent for us to process your personal data, for example, when subscribing to our newsletters or accepting certain cookies on your device, you are free to revoke your consent at any time, either by using the functionality provided within the appropriate product feature or by contacting us (see ‘Contact us’ below). However, please be aware that we may have the right to continue to process your information if it can be justified on one of the other legal bases mentioned above.
You have the right to object to how we process your personal data, or ask us to restrict the processing. Please see ‘Your rights’ below, for more details.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These guidelines are just that: guiding principles. Please understand that we have the final say with regard to the interpretation and application of these guidelines, and we can update them at any time. If you’d like more detailed information about how we work, you’re welcome to visit our Support Center.
We love it when you put on your superhero sidekick shirt and help us protect our platform by letting us know about problematic reviews — especially if you’ve got proof. Only flag a review if you genuinely believe there’s a problem, and please be fair and consistent.
We’ll check flagged reviews to see if they breach our guidelines. And if they do, we’ll take action.
Your review is owned by you. That means you can edit, update or delete your review at any time. You’re encouraged to update an existing review if you want to add more information about a particular experience. And while it’s fine to write more than one review for a business if you’ve had more than one experience, please don’t bombard a business with lots of reviews, because that’s not helpful for anyone.
You need a user account to post a review. Just like your first kiss, you only get one user account and it should involve a real person. Your username, profile description and picture must reflect who you are (don’t go impersonating other people, thanks) and can’t be harmful, hateful, discriminatory, defamatory or obscene — because everyone can see your profile! If you do include something you shouldn’t, or you create more than one account, we can delete your account/s.
Your user account also needs to be connected to a valid, permanent email address in case we need to contact you.
Sometimes your account is automatically created and pre-filled with your name, like if you click on an email invitation link from a company or sign up via Facebook. You can always edit your details to include only the information you want publicly displayed.
Your reviews are public. That’s why it’s not a good idea to include your own sensitive or personal information, and it’s never OK to include someone else’s. We’re talking phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and anything else that could be used to track, identify, contact or impersonate someone. We want the privacy and safety of yourself and others to be respected and protected.
Keep your reviews relevant — don’t include any promotional references, marketing material or links. This isn’t the place to sell stuff, offer discount codes, form action groups or meet other like-minded singles in your area
That’s a tough one to explain. We’re a platform that sits between landlords, tenants and rental agencies, so we have to balance competing responsibilities. We want to let everyone tell their story (good or bad), but we’re also required to take down words and statements that are likely to cause serious harm to someone’s reputation or serious financial loss to a business.
The most powerful reviews explain what took place and leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.
We don’t get involved in disputes about what actually went down between a reviewer and a business. Property Wars is a review platform, not a regulatory authority or a court of law.
We expect you to be a respectful contributor to our platform. So play nice, don’t be a jerk. Don’t post anything harmful, hateful, discriminatory, defamatory or obscene. And don’t lie, bully, blackmail, make threats or do anything illegal.
Here are our tips for writing a great review.
Hold onto documentation that shows you’ve had an experience with the company (for example, a receipt, order confirmation, screenshot of your chat with online customer service) because you might be asked to verify your experience.
Don’t make up an experience or write a review for someone else — leave it to them to write their own review. And if you’re closely associated with, work for, or are in competition with a particular company, you shouldn’t review it.
You can write a review if you’ve had a recent, genuine experience.
Reviews are your chance to share your experiences with others and give feedback to companies. Size doesn’t matter here, we think all experiences big and small are worth reviewing — whether it’s a phone call, an online order, a visit to your local store or otherwise using a company’s products or service.
Just keep it fresh by writing about your experience that happened in the past 12 months. While your story about buying a boombox in the 80s is cool, it’s less relevant for consumers looking to invest in today’s hi-tech audio products. When you share your recent experiences, other readers get a feel for how a company is operating now. And companies get valuable up-to-date feedback. Learn more about who can write a review and when.
Social Contact