Privacy Notice

Introduction and who we are

This notice explains what Burtronix CC (registration number 1996/045193/23), trading as Stage Africa ("Stage Africa", "we", "us"), does with your personal information when you use this website. Burtronix CC is the responsible party under South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013.

Our Information Officer is Andries Petrus (Riaan) Burger. You can reach us about your personal information, or to exercise your rights, at privacy@stage.africa.

This notice covers this website. The Stage Africa apps have their own, because an app collects different things.

The personal information we collect

We collect the personal information we need to run this site and to understand how it is used, and no more. On this website the categories are:

What your browser sends. Your IP address, your browser and device type, your operating system, the pages you open, and the site that referred you. Our web server records this in order to serve pages and to keep the site secure.
How you use the site: which pages you open, what you do on them, and what you search for. This is collected by Google Analytics, and the analytics section below lists it in full.
What you send us through the contact form. Your name, your email address, your reason for writing, a subject, the message itself, and your organisation if you choose to give one. We do not ask for a telephone number.
Your email address, if you ask for our newsletter. Nothing else.
What you send us by email. Whatever you choose to write to us at the addresses we publish.

We do not ask you to create an account, and this site has no public registration.

How we use your personal information

We use your personal information for these purposes:

To run the site. To serve pages, keep the site available, and keep it secure.
To understand how the site is used. Which articles are read, how people arrive, and what they search for, so that we can write better ones.
To answer you. To reply to your contact-form message or to your email.
To send you our newsletter, if you asked for it and confirmed the request.
To advertise Stage Africa, and to measure whether that advertising works. This rests on your consent and it is not running yet. The analytics and advertising section says exactly what it will involve.
To meet our legal duties, and to keep the records the law requires.

The newsletter runs on confirmed consent. Filling in the sign-up form does not put you on the list: it sends one email to the address given, and the address joins the list only when the link in that email is followed. This means nobody can subscribe you, and if you receive a confirmation you did not ask for, ignoring it is enough.

Everything we send comes from Stage Africa at info@stage.africa, and every issue carries a link to unsubscribe. You can leave at any time, through that link or by writing to privacy@stage.africa.

We do not build advertising profiles of you today. If you consent to the advertising category and we begin advertising, we will use what you did on this site to reach you with our own advertising on other services.

Why we are allowed to do this

We only use your personal information where the law allows it, and four reasons apply here.

Because you asked us to, when you write to us or sign up for the newsletter.
Because we have a legitimate interest in it: running the site, keeping it secure, and knowing which articles are read. We weigh that against your interests and keep it narrow.
Because the law requires it, tax records being the usual example.
Because you agreed to it, and this notice says which things those are. You can withdraw that permission at any time, and doing so does not make what we did beforehand unlawful.

Analytics and advertising

This section describes what our analytics does, because it is the main way this site collects information about you.

We use Google Analytics 4. Its measurement identifier is G-RBWRSLJF54 and it has been running on this site since 25 July 2026. It records the pages you open, how far you scroll, the links you follow away from the site, the files you download, the videos you play, the searches you run in our search box, and the fact that you interacted with a form. It does not record what you type into a form.

Google receives that information and processes it in the United States. Once a day it also copies the events themselves into a Google BigQuery dataset held in the United States, which we keep so that we can analyse them ourselves rather than only through Google's reports. What is copied is what happened: the pages opened, when, and the browser identifier, device and approximate location that came with them. It does not carry your name, and we do not ask Google to estimate anything about you.

We have deliberately not turned on Google signals, the setting that would let Google recognise you across your devices and add demographic and interest categories to what it knows. No Google Ads account is linked to this site. Neither of those changes without the advertising consent described below.

We intend to advertise Stage Africa, and to measure whether our advertising works. That is not running yet. When it does, it will mean using what you did on this site to reach you with our own advertising on other services, and measuring which advertisements brought people here. We ask for your consent to that separately, before it starts, and you can withdraw it at any time.

Decisions about what we advertise, where, and how much we spend are made with the help of automated tools working on this information. Those tools make no decision about you that has legal consequences or that affects you in a similarly significant way.

We share personal information only where it is needed to run this site, and only with recipients who are bound to protect it:

Google. Google Analytics and Google BigQuery process the analytics information described above, and Google Workspace carries our email, so anything you send to one of our published addresses is held in a Google mailbox. All three act on our instructions and as our operator, and may not use what they hold for their own purposes.
Xneelo. The South African company whose servers this site runs on, and who operate them for us.
Legal and safety. Where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to establish, exercise, or defend a legal claim, or to protect the rights and safety of people.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with other companies for their own marketing. If we ever transfer the business, we will tell you before your information becomes subject to a different notice.

When your information leaves the country

This site runs on servers in South Africa, hosted by Xneelo. What you submit through the contact form and the newsletter sign-up is stored there, on our own server.

Your correspondence does not stay there. Our mail is handled by Google Workspace, so when the contact form sends us your message, and when you write to any of our published addresses, a copy of it reaches a Google mailbox outside South Africa. That includes anything you send to privacy@stage.africa.

The analytics information does not stay here either. Google Analytics processes it in the United States, and the daily export of it goes to a Google BigQuery dataset also held in the United States.

Both are transfers of personal information out of South Africa. We make them under the data processing terms we have with Google, which bind Google to protect your information to a standard the law here treats as adequate.

How long we keep it

How long we keep information depends on what it is.

Analytics held inside Google Analytics. Event-level data for two months, and user-level data for fourteen months. Both clocks restart each time the same person visits again, so the information about somebody who reads us regularly is not two months old.
The analytics export held in BigQuery. Twenty-six months from the day each day's data is written, after which it is deleted automatically.
Contact-form messages. Twelve months, after which they are deleted automatically, unless we need them for longer to deal with a legal claim.
Email you send us directly. Two years from your last message to us, on the same exception. Nothing deletes this on its own: we go through the mailbox once a year and clear out what is older than that.
Newsletter subscriptions. Until you unsubscribe. When you do, we stop sending immediately and we keep your address on a do-not-contact record rather than deleting it, so that we can honour the request and prove we honoured it. That record is kept indefinitely, because its whole purpose is to stop us adding you back. If you want it gone as well, ask us and we will remove what we can, keeping only the minimum needed to make sure we do not contact you again. A sign-up that is never confirmed is deleted after seven days.
Web server logs. Seven days.
Records the law requires us to keep. For as long as the law requires and no longer. Tax records are kept for five years under South African law.

When a period ends we delete the information, or we remove what identifies you and keep only counts and totals.

How we protect it

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your personal information against loss, unauthorised access, and misuse. These include access controls, encryption of data in transit, and giving the people who operate the site only the access they need.

No online service can promise perfect security, and we do not. If we have reasonable grounds to believe that someone has accessed or taken your personal information without permission, we will notify the Information Regulator, and we will notify you, as soon as reasonably possible after we discover it. We will email you where we can, and where we cannot work out who was affected we will publish the notice on this site. It will say what happened, what we are doing about it, and what you can do to protect yourself.

This site uses cookies and similar technologies in three groups, and you can change what you allow at any time.

Necessary. The ones the site cannot work without. Today that is one cookie, burtronix_consent, which remembers what you chose and which version of the question you answered. It is kept for a year and it does not track you.
Analytics. Two cookies, _ga and _ga_RBWRSLJF54, which Google Analytics uses to recognise a returning browser and count visits. They are kept for 400 days. These are on when you arrive, and you can switch them off.
Advertising. Nothing is set today, and nothing will be unless you turn this group on. Doing so changes what we are allowed to tell Google. No advertising cookie is placed, because we do not advertise yet. When that changes we will list what is set here before it is set.

We read that list off a clean browser on 31 July 2026, and we will read it again whenever it changes.

Measurement is on when you arrive because we need to know which articles are being read in order to decide what to publish next, and because counting readers is a reasonable thing for a publication to do without asking first. It tells us about pages rather than about people: it does not know your name, it is not joined to any account you hold anywhere, and we do not use it to build a profile of you. Advertising is the opposite of that, which is why it stays off until you say otherwise. We will not turn it on for you.

You can switch analytics off, or advertising on, using the Cookie Choices control in our footer, on every page. Refusing is exactly as easy as accepting, and if you refuse everything then burtronix_consent is the only cookie left on the site.

We do not carry other companies' advertising trackers on this site.

You can also control cookies through your browser settings, which will override anything you tell us here.

Your rights and how to exercise them

You have rights over your personal information. They include the right to:

access the personal information we hold about you;
correct or update it;
ask us to delete information we should not still be holding;
object to processing we base on our legitimate interests;
withdraw a consent you have given, at any time; and
complain to the Information Regulator.

To exercise any of these, write to privacy@stage.africa. We may first ask you to show us who you are, because we are not going to hand your information to somebody else on request. We answer within 30 days, or within 60 if we tell you why inside the first 30.

Correcting, deleting, and objecting are free. If you ask us for copies of records, the Promotion of Access to Information Act sets what may be charged for that, and we may not charge you anything it does not set. We will not treat you differently for asking. Withdrawing a consent does not affect processing we already carried out lawfully before you withdrew it.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your personal information, you may complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa):

Email: POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za, or PAIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za if we refused you access to a record
Phone: 010 023 5200, or toll-free 0800 017 160
Address: Woodmead North Office Park, 54 Maxwell Drive, Woodmead, Johannesburg, 2191

Changes to this notice

We may update this notice as the site and the law change. The version on this page is the one that applies, and it carries the date it took effect.

When we make a material change we will say so on the page before it takes effect, and we will leave the previous version reachable so you can see what changed. Because this site has no accounts, we cannot record which version you read, and we do not pretend to.

Where a change needs your consent rather than your notice, we will ask you for it again.

Version 1.0, effective 3 August 2026.