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Privacy & POPIA
Cyber Conduct is designed to provide useful cybersecurity help without asking people to hand over information they do not need to provide.
The Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA) is South Africa's principal law governing the processing and protection of personal information. It establishes requirements for the lawful processing of personal information and provides rights and remedies for people whose information is processed.
This page explains how Cyber Conduct currently approaches personal information and privacy. It is intended as a plain-language privacy notice and not as legal advice.
Cyber Conduct does not require visitors to create an account or sign in to use its core resources. You can use the main guidance, tools and resources without creating a user profile.
If you use the Contact Us form, you may choose to provide information such as your name, email address, the reason for contacting us and the contents of your message.
The Contact Us form opens your own email client with a prepared message. Cyber Conduct does not receive that message merely because you complete the form. Information is only sent to us if you choose to send the email.
Please do not include passwords, PINs, one-time passwords, banking details, recovery codes, identity documents or other sensitive credentials in a contact message.
Scam Radar allows people to submit community reports about suspected scams and suspicious activity without creating an account. A report can include information such as a title, description, category, channel, suspicious message wording, an indicator and the organisation being impersonated.
Only provide information that is necessary to describe the suspected scam. Do not submit passwords, PINs, one-time passwords, recovery codes, banking credentials, identity documents, private addresses or other sensitive personal information.
Reports that are published on Scam Radar are visible to website visitors. Scam Radar therefore should not be used to submit private information about yourself or another person.
Scam Radar may accept an indicator such as a phone number, email address, website, username, bank account or cryptocurrency address when it helps describe a suspected scam.
Where supported, submitted indicators are masked before they are stored for the report. For example, an email address or phone number may be shown only in partially obscured form. This is intended to reduce unnecessary exposure of contact or account information.
Masking is not a substitute for careful reporting. Do not submit sensitive credentials or information that should remain private simply because a field appears to support an indicator.
Scam Radar uses automated checks to identify ordinary reports that may be suitable for publication. Reports containing potentially sensitive, threatening or personally identifying material can remain unpublished for review.
A report being published does not mean that Cyber Conduct has independently verified every detail in the report. Community submissions should be treated as signals that may help identify patterns, not as proof that a particular person, number, organisation or account is fraudulent.
Cyber Conduct may reject, remove or otherwise restrict reports that are unsafe, inappropriate, misleading, abusive or inconsistent with the purpose of Scam Radar.
The Password Generator and the "Is This Suspicious?" checker are designed to operate in your browser. Information entered into those tools is not intentionally sent to a Cyber Conduct server by the tools themselves.
The suspicious-message checker is intended to help you assess text without requiring you to submit that text to Cyber Conduct. Even so, avoid entering passwords, authentication codes or other sensitive information into any website tool.
Checklist progress is currently kept within the browser session used for the checklist. It is not intentionally transmitted to Cyber Conduct as part of the checklist feature.
Like most websites, Cyber Conduct may generate standard technical information through its hosting and infrastructure, such as server request logs. These records can be necessary for operating, securing, troubleshooting and maintaining the website.
Cyber Conduct does not use those ordinary technical logs as a reason to ask visitors for additional personal information.
Cyber Conduct currently does not intentionally use third-party analytics or advertising trackers as part of Version 1 of the website.
If this changes, this privacy notice will be updated to explain the relevant processing and tracking practices.
Where you voluntarily provide personal information, it may be used for the specific purpose for which you provided it, such as responding to a contact enquiry, addressing feedback or communicating with you about your request.
Information submitted through Scam Radar may be used to review, moderate and publish community scam reports and to help identify broader scam patterns or themes.
We do not intend to use information submitted through the website for unrelated purposes without an appropriate basis for doing so.
Cyber Conduct does not intentionally sell personal information. Information may be processed by service providers involved in operating the website where this is necessary for the service to function, such as hosting, database or technical infrastructure.
Published Scam Radar reports are intentionally made available to website visitors. This is part of the purpose of the feature, so reports should only contain information that the reporter is comfortable making public.
We will not ask you to provide sensitive account credentials to us as part of ordinary website use.
Information may be retained for as long as reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, including operating the website, handling enquiries, moderating Scam Radar reports and maintaining appropriate security records.
Scam Radar reports may be removed or unpublished where Cyber Conduct considers this appropriate, including where a report contains prohibited information, creates an unreasonable privacy or safety risk, or no longer serves the purpose of the feature.
We take reasonable steps to protect information handled through Cyber Conduct and to limit unnecessary access. No internet service can guarantee absolute security, so visitors should also take care not to submit information that should remain private.
POPIA provides data subjects with rights concerning their personal information. Depending on the circumstances, these can include rights relating to being informed about processing, access to personal information, correction or deletion, and other protections provided by the Act.
If you have a privacy question or believe Cyber Conduct has handled your personal information incorrectly, please contact us so that the matter can be reviewed.
Cyber Conduct may change its technology, features or business model over time. If a change affects how personal information is handled, this page will be updated to reflect the new practice.
Our approach is simple: if Cyber Conduct does not need information to provide a particular feature, we do not want to ask for it just because we can. Privacy is part of how the platform is designed, not something we want people to discover only after they have already shared their information.