Stage Africa Privacy Notice, Version 1.8

This is version 1.8, which applied from 8 October 2026 until 9 October 2026. Read the version in effect now.

About This Notice

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 four things, because Stage Africa is now more than one website:

• This website at stage.africa, whether you are reading it or hold an account on it.
• Our forum at forum.stage.africa, which you enter with the same account.
• Our app, the Partner Dance Style Identifier, which you sign in to with the same account, on your phone or on this website. Its own section says what it adds.
• A website we build and run for a member from their own entry. What we hold about that member is covered here. What visitors to that website do there is between them and that member.

If you are listed in our directory and have never dealt with us, this notice still tells you what we hold and how to reach us. Most of the directory is compiled by us from public sources as journalism, and the parts of the Act that would otherwise require us to come and tell you do not apply to that. They do apply once you take an account and claim your entry, and from that point this notice is the notice the Act asks us to give you.

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 Analytics and advertising lists it in full.
• What you send us through the contact form. Your name, your e-mail address, your reason for writing, a subject, the message itself, and your organisation if you choose to give one. We keep the internet address you sent it from, alongside the message. The form does not ask for a telephone number.
• Your e-mail address, if you ask for one of our two mailing lists, Stage Africa's newsletter or news of the Partner Dance Style Identifier, and which of them you asked for. We keep the day you asked, the day you confirmed, and where you asked from, and nothing else about you.
• What you send us by e-mail. Whatever you choose to write to us at the addresses we publish.

You do not need an account to read this site. If you hold one, we also collect:

• Your account. Your e-mail address, which is how you sign in. If you set a password, we hold it in a form we cannot read. You need never set one, because you can sign in with a code we e-mail you or through Google instead, and neither of those gives you a password you were never told about. If you turn on two-factor sign-in, we hold what that needs. We record when you signed in and from where, because that is how an account that has been broken into is found.
• What signing in by e-mail collects. The address you typed, the page you were going to, and a scrambled copy of the code and of the link we send you, which is what we check against when you come back. We do not keep the code itself. It works once, lasts fifteen minutes, and stops working after five wrong tries. We delete the row about a day after it expires. The e-mail names the network address the code was asked from, and for an hour we keep that address alongside yours, so that nobody can ask for code after code.
• What Google tells us, if you sign in with Google. Google sends us your name, your e-mail address, that it has verified that address, its own identifier for your Google account, the language you use, and the address of your Google profile picture if you have one. We keep two of those on your account: your address, and the identifier, which is how your next Google sign-in finds the same account. We discard the rest, including the name, and we never fetch the picture. If Google does not tell us it has verified your address, we refuse the sign-in before we touch any account, and you can sign in with a code at your address instead. If the address is new to us, we make no account until you have confirmed that you are 18 or older and accepted our terms. While we ask, your session holds four things: your address, Google's identifier for your account, the name Google sent, so that the page can say whose account it would be, and the page you were going to. We drop them when you answer that page, either way, and otherwise they go with your session. Google issues our site a key as you sign in, which our server uses once to ask who you are. We ask Google for the kind that cannot be renewed, and Google gives such a key a short life of its own, about an hour by Google's own account. We drop it as soon as our server has asked, whether the sign-in worked or failed, so nothing we hold can then ask Google about you, and we make no further call to Google. We read all of this in the site's own code, and the request it sends Google off the running site, on 8 October 2026.
• Who you are, on your account. Your first and last name, what we should call you, and if you give them, a nickname and the name you work under. You choose whether the people who look after an entry with you can see your name.
• Your telephone number, if you give us one. Giving it does nothing by itself. We ask separately about each thing we would do with it, and today there is one such thing, whether we may telephone you. A second, whether the number may be shown on a listing you look after, is written and is not being asked, because nothing on our site shows a telephone number on an entry yet. We keep each answer you do give with the date you gave it, the version of this notice you gave it under, and where you gave it, and you can take any of them back at any time. Until you say yes to one of them the number is shown to nobody and used for nothing.
• Your biography, if you write one. What you write about yourself, and a photograph of you if you add one. Other members can read it.
• What you tell us in order to claim an entry. Who you are, what your connection to the business or the person is, and whatever you send us to show it.
• What you publish. Your profile, your pictures, your entry's details, and your answer to whether each picture is yours to publish, which we keep with the date and your name against it because an answer nobody can date is worth very little.
• What you do in the forum. Your posts, your chat messages, the personal messages you send, what you search for there and which result you opened, what you read, a post you started and never sent, and the preferences you set.

It keeps every page you open, with the internet address your device is using, the address of the page, where you came from, your browser and the operating system it reports, an identifier that links the pages you open in one sitting, the country you were in, and the network your address belongs to. If you are signed in, your account is on that record as well. For each sitting it keeps how long you were active on the page and counts of your mouse movements, clicks, key presses, scrolls and taps.

It also keeps which topics you opened and on which day, how far you read in each one, when you first and last looked at it, how long you spent on each post in it, which days you came and how much you read on each, whose profile you looked at and who looked at yours, and running totals of how many topics you have entered, how many posts you have read, how long you have read for and how many days you have visited. Those totals are shown on your forum profile and in its list of members, where anybody can read them.

We read all of that on the forum itself on 23 September 2026, and it is everything the forum keeps about a reader that we found. The forum records the internet addresses you use it from, and our moderators can see the one you registered from and the one you last used. When you enter the forum, and after that whenever any of them changes, we pass it your e-mail address, your account name, the name you asked us to call you by, and the groups you are in, including whether you look after an entry in the directory and which ones, where they have groups of their own. That is how the forum knows who you are without you signing in twice, and which rooms you can read and post in.

• What you do in the Partner Dance Style Identifier. The songs it recognised for you, and your votes and ratings, which its own section sets out.
• What you tell us about your dancing, if you answer About You. How you dance, from a list of seven that runs from social dancer to dance business owner, and you may pick as many as fit. Whether you usually lead, usually follow or switch between both. Which of the venues in our directory you go to for social dancing, chosen from a list rather than typed. And whether you want to be asked, after you vote on a song, what that song suits. You can answer none of it, and you can change or clear any answer afterwards. The app asks under About You in its settings and the tagging page on this website asks the same questions, so answering once covers both.
• What you pay for, if you take Pro or Ultra or the free Pro pass. Which you have, when it started and when it ends, that you agreed to it starting at once, and for each payment its amount, whether it went through, and our and PayFast's references for it. Your card details go to PayFast and never to us.
• Your groups. Which groups you are in and which you run, the links you make to bring people into a group, and which link you joined a group through and when.
• What the anti-spam checks record. Every form here is protected against automated submission, and a submission that is refused is logged.

Two things about the directory that are easy to misread. Most listings were compiled by us from public sources and the people in them never gave us anything; if that is you, what we hold is what we found. And a photograph a member uploads may show people who are not members and never agreed to anything, which Photographs of people who did not send them deals with.

Photographs of People Who Did Not Send Them

Some of what appears on this site is a photograph of somebody who never sent us anything. When a dance school puts up pictures from a production, the people in them are its pupils, their families, and whoever was on stage that night. Many of them are children.

We should be straight about what that means for you if you are one of them.

We did not collect that photograph from you and we cannot ask you first, because we do not know who you are. What we do instead is put the responsibility on the person uploading it, and we do that in two different ways.

We ask them one question, beside each picture, before they can upload it: whether the picture is theirs to publish. That one is a tick box, it stops the upload if it is unanswered, and we keep the answer with the date and their name against it.

We ask them two more, once. With their first photograph they undertake that anyone who can be recognised in their photographs has agreed to appear here, and that where somebody is under 18, a parent or guardian has agreed. They give those two once rather than for each picture, and we keep the day they gave them and put that date on every photograph of a person they upload afterwards. We are relying on the school or the studio, which is the only party in a position to know and to ask.

That record holds what they undertook and the day they undertook it. It does not record who agreed, or which child, or when. We are not verifying any of it, and we are not pretending to.

What protects you here is that you can have the photograph taken down, immediately, by asking. Write to privacy@stage.africa, tell us which picture, and you do not have to prove anything or explain why. A parent or guardian can do this for a child. We take it down first and work out where it came from afterwards.

While a photograph is up it is public. It can be read by anybody, indexed by search engines, and shown on a website we run for the person who uploaded it. Taking it down removes it from all of those. It cannot remove a copy somebody else has already made, which is true of anything published anywhere.

If you want to know what we hold about you, or you think a photograph should never have been here, Your rights and how to exercise them is the route, and it applies to you whether or not you have ever dealt with us.

The Partner Dance Style Identifier

The Partner Dance Style Identifier is our app for partner dancers. It listens to a song and says which partner dances suit it, from the judgement of the people who dance them. It runs on Android and iPhone, and on this website as a page for a computer. Without an account you can search it for a song by name and see what dancers say about it, and the app then sends our server what you searched for and nothing about you. Recognising a song that is playing needs you to sign in with your Stage Africa account, so everything in this notice applies to you there as well, and this section says what the app adds.

While the app's listening screen is open, it records from your phone's microphone and sends the sound to our server, which sends it on to ACRCloud, the company that recognises the song. It sends whatever the microphone hears, so a voice in the room goes with the music. It stops recording when you leave that screen. Neither we nor ACRCloud keep the sound. ACRCloud does keep what it makes from it, a fingerprint of what it heard and the song it found, for a period set by its own schedule, which it has not published. We send ACRCloud the sound and nothing about you, and what it keeps carries no name. We keep the song it found and when you asked, against your account, and nothing else about the listening.

What you tell the app about a song is kept, and other people rely on it:

• Your votes on how well each dance suits a track, as Perfect, Can Do, In a Pinch or No.
• Your ratings of a track for social dancing, performance and practice, and, if you teach, the level you think it suits.
• A dance you add because the list is missing it.
• A playlist you ask the app to read, which is its link and the tracks we found in it. To read it, our server asks the service that holds the playlist for its list of tracks, and sends it the link and nothing about you.

Your votes, ratings and added dances go into a shared record of which dances suit which music. Everybody's answer is worked out from everybody's votes, so once you have voted, other people's answers depend on yours. For that reason the record rests on our legitimate interest in keeping it whole, as the forum does. When you close your account, your name comes off your votes, ratings and added dances, and they stay in the record. They stay linked to one another under a number, so that the weight your votes earned stays with them, and for three years our record of the closing can still connect that number to your account. If you object to our keeping them, for a reason that applies to you, write to privacy@stage.africa and we will consider it as the law requires. The contributor terms, which you accept the first time you vote, say what you allow us to do with them.

Not every vote counts the same. From your first vote we measure how often yours agree with tracks whose answer we already know, which we keep hidden, and then with what everybody else says. That measure decides how much weight your votes carry. Every vote in the record is a person's, and no computer model of ours votes. A member whose votes agree well and often can be given a badge. We show your badge only if you agree to it, on your account's profile, on a directory entry you look after, and on the forum, and you can take it down at any time. Taking it down does not change how much your votes count.

About You, in the app's settings and on this website's tagging page, asks four optional things about your dancing. How you dance, from seven kinds that run from social dancer to dance business owner, as many as fit. Whether you usually lead, usually follow, or switch between both. Which of the venues in our directory you go to for social dancing. And whether you want to be asked, after you vote, what the song suits. Teacher is the same answer the tagging page already asks for, so you give it once.

What you answer there describes who voted. It lets a result be read for the kind of dancer who voted, and for the floors those dancers dance on, so that somebody reading it can see whose judgement it is. It does not change how much your vote counts, which is earned by agreeing with the record and with other people and by nothing else. The app never asks your phone where it is, and the venue list comes from our directory, so what we learn is the places you choose to name as ones you dance at and nothing about where you are at any time. We do not show other members which venues you chose, and where we break a result down by floor we show it only where enough people have answered for no single answer to stand out. Whether you want the question after a vote is kept with your account rather than on your phone, so it follows you to a new one.

The app sells nothing and shows no prices. A paid account can save playlist readings and collections of tracks, and keep private notes on a track.

We show those to nobody else. They go when you delete them or close your account.

The app plays a track through YouTube's player or Spotify's, or gives you a link to open it yourself. A player loads only when you press play. From that moment YouTube or Spotify receives whatever its player collects, which can include its own advertising and measurement, under its own privacy notice, and if you are signed in to that service it knows it was you. We tell neither of them anything about you when you press play, and nothing from either of them is added to what we hold.

The app on your phone carries no advertising of its own, and no analytics or crash-reporting service. It does not ask for your location, your contacts or your photos, and it keeps nothing on your phone beyond your sign-in and your settings. Google Play, and Apple once the app is there, tell us how often the app crashes or freezes, counted across the phones whose owners let their phone share that, without saying whose they are. On a computer the Identifier is a page of this website, so the cookie choices in this notice apply to it there. In the app you can ask for Stage Africa's newsletter, or for news of the Identifier alone, which are two separate lists, and you leave either the same way as anywhere else.

The Identifier is for adults, as this website is, and nobody under 18 may hold the account it signs in with.

What We Use It For

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 e-mail.
• To send you our newsletter, or news of the Partner Dance Style Identifier, if you asked for that list and confirmed the request. They are two lists and you choose either, both or neither.
• To sell advertising on our own pages, and to choose which advertisement a signed-in member is shown from what they told us for their directory entry.
• To advertise Stage Africa on other services, and to measure whether that advertising works. This rests on your consent and it is not running yet. Analytics and advertising says what both kinds involve.
• To meet our legal duties, and to keep the records the law requires.

If you hold an account, we also use it:

• To run the account. To let you sign in, to keep it secure, to let you into the forum without signing in twice, and to write to you about the account itself.
• To decide a claim. To work out whether the person asking to edit an entry is who they say they are, and to keep the record of why we decided as we did.
• To publish what you have asked us to publish. Your profile, your pictures, your entry's details, and your posts, in the places the terms describe, including a website we build for you from your entry.
• To use your pictures in what we publish ourselves, such as an article or an issue of our magazine, including one we sell, as the permission you give when you upload them allows.
• To run groups. To give a group its room on the forum, to let you join a group through a link and leave it, to show the people in a group who is in it, and to show whoever runs it who joined through each link while that link works, so that they can take out somebody the link was forwarded to.
• To run the Partner Dance Style Identifier. To recognise a song you ask it about, to work out which dances suit a track from everybody's votes, to weigh each vote, and to show a badge you agreed to.
• To say which dancers an answer came from. What you tell us under About You lets us show which dances suit a track as the kind of dancer who voted sees it, and tie what is danced to the floors it is danced on. It is never used to make your own vote count for more or less.
• To use your telephone number for what you allowed and nothing else. If you said it may be shown, to show it on the listing you chose. If you said we may telephone you, to telephone you about dancing and about Stage Africa: your own entry or listing, an opportunity such as joining a troupe or writing for us, an invitation to a dance event, which may be one we are charging to attend, or to ask your advice in your own field. Those calls come from Riaan Burger or somebody he names. Not for either permission before you say so. Inviting you to our own events aside, not to sell you anything: to telephone you about something else we are selling we have to ask you separately, and this permission does not cover it.
• To sell you Pro or Ultra, to give you what you paid for, and to keep the record of each payment that the tax law asks of us.
• To moderate. To read what is going on a directory page before it goes up, to act on a complaint, and to deal with somebody who is misusing the site.

Both mailing lists run on confirmed consent. Filling in a sign-up form does not put you on a list: it sends one e-mail to the address given, and the address joins only when the link in that e-mail is followed. This means nobody can subscribe you, and if you receive a confirmation you did not ask for, ignoring it is enough. If you sign up while signed in to your account, the address on your account joins at once, because you confirmed that address when you made the account. If you ask for both lists together, you confirm once and join both.

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. Leaving one list leaves you on the other, because they are separate lists and each one needs its own yes. Your account is separate from both, so you join and leave a list on its own, and closing your account leaves you on whichever you were on.

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. We do not use your account, your profile, or anything you have published to target advertising. The forum carries no analytics service from Google or anyone else. Its own software keeps the record instead, on our servers. The Personal Information We Collect says what that record holds, and How Long We Keep It says how long we keep it. The Cookie Choices control in our footer does not reach the forum, and switching analytics off there does not stop the forum recording what you read.

Why We Are Allowed To

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 one of our mailing lists. Holding an account works the same way: you asked for it, and running it is how we give you what you asked for.
• Because we have a legitimate interest in it: running the site, keeping it secure, knowing which articles are read, moderating what gets published, and compiling a directory of who does what in South African dance. 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.

Two of those need pinning to something specific, because they are the ones a reader would otherwise have to guess at.

Publishing what a member puts on their own entry rests on their permission and on nothing else. That is their profile, their pictures and their galleries. The permission is asked for at the moment they upload, it is recorded with the date, and withdrawing it takes the material down from the entry and from everything we build from it. Where members look after an entry together, its profile rests on the permission of those who still do, which is why a shared profile stays up when one of them leaves, without that member's pictures.

A forum post rests on something different, and the reason is other people. Once somebody has replied to a post, that post is part of a conversation they took part in, and removing it takes their reply out of sense. So keeping the forum readable is our own legitimate interest, and that is what publishing a post rests on rather than permission that can be withdrawn. It leaves nobody stuck with something they regret: we will take a member's name off their posts for the asking, and Your rights and how to exercise them says what else they can ask for and when we have to agree.

The Identifier's shared record of which dances suit which music rests on the same interest, for the same reason. Once you have voted, other people's answers are worked out from your vote, and its section says what happens to your votes when you leave.

What you tell us about yourself under About You rests on your permission instead, and so does your telephone number. A vote is different because other people's answers are worked out from yours, so taking a vote back would change what every other member is shown. Taking an About You answer back changes only what we may do from then on: your votes stay where they are and stop being counted as a social dancer's or a teacher's. A permission like that is one we can honour when you withdraw it, rather than a request we would have to weigh against keeping the record whole. Your number carries two permissions of its own, each kept with the date and the version of this notice you gave it under. Taking one back stops what it allowed.

Most of the directory rests on a different footing again. Compiling and publishing a reference work about who does what in a field is journalism, and the law here treats journalism differently from ordinary record-keeping. That is why an entry can exist without our having asked the person in it. It stops being the whole answer the moment somebody claims their entry and takes an account, because running an account is not journalism, and from that point the ordinary rules in this notice apply to them.

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 asking you first.

We sell advertising on this site and we serve it ourselves. An advertisement comes from our own server with the rest of the page. It is not bought through an advertising network, no other company is told that you were shown one, and it sets nothing in your browser.

If you are signed in, an advertisement may be chosen from what you have told us about yourself: where you are, what you teach or dance, and the other details you gave us for your directory entry. We use what you volunteered, not what we watched you do. We do not use your reading to choose an advertisement, nothing we buy from anybody else is added to what we hold about you, and if you are not signed in you see the same advertisements as everybody else.

We count how often each advertisement is seen and how often it is clicked. When one has been at least half on your screen for a second, your browser tells this site which advertisement it was and where on the page it sat. When you click one, the link takes you through this site on the way to wherever the advertisement points. The count keeps a number for each advertisement, in each place on a page, on each day. It uses no cookie and keeps no identifier and no internet address, so it cannot say who saw an advertisement or who clicked one.

We also count how much each story is read, to choose the popular stories we list on the front page. Once a story's page has loaded, your browser tells this site which story it was, and that story's count goes up. The count halves every week, so a story read a lot today counts for more than one read a lot last month. It uses no cookie and keeps no identifier, no internet address, and nothing about who read it.

We also intend to advertise Stage Africa on other services, and to measure whether that advertising works. That is a different thing from the advertising we sell here, and it is not running yet. When it starts, it will mean using what you did on this site to reach you elsewhere, 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.

Who Else Sees It

We share personal information only where it is needed to run this site. Every recipient is named here, with what reaches it and what holds it to anything:

• Google. Google Analytics and Google BigQuery process our analytics information, and Google Workspace carries our e-mail, 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 to identify you or to sell anything to you. One thing they may do with it is pool it, in a form that names nobody, with the same measurements from other websites, so that Google can publish industry comparisons and improve how it models the gaps in its own figures. That is a setting on our account and we can switch it off. Google is also one of the ways you can sign in, and there Google is not our operator and does not act on our instructions. It acts for itself, and answers for what it does under its own privacy notice. When you choose that way in, your browser goes to Google, so Google learns that you are signing in to Stage Africa. What Google tells us in return is in The Personal Information We Collect.
• Xneelo. The South African company whose servers this site runs on, and who operate them for us. Our forum runs on the same servers, and so does the mailbox that takes your replies to it, so no other company handles a reply you send by e-mail.
• ACRCloud. The company that recognises a song for the Partner Dance Style Identifier. It receives the sound the app hears and nothing about you, acts on our instructions as our operator, and keeps what it makes from the sound, as that app's section says.
• PayFast. If you pay for Pro or Ultra, PayFast takes the payment for us, on its own page, as our operator. We send it the amount, what it is for, our reference for the payment, and your name and e-mail address, and it tells us whether the payment went through and gives us its own reference and, for a monthly payment, a token to take the next one. Its terms with us also let it use what it receives for purposes of its own, which include the card companies' rules, detecting fraud, and developing its business, and pass it to companies in its group and to others, inside or outside South Africa.
• 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.

YouTube and Spotify receive nothing about you from us. When you ask the Identifier to read a playlist, our server asks the service that holds it for its tracks and sends it the playlist's link alone. When you press play in one of their players, that service collects from your device directly, under its own privacy notice.

Two things are publication rather than sharing, and they look the same from outside.

What you publish here is public. A profile, a picture, an entry's details and a forum post can be read by anybody, indexed by search engines, and copied by people we have no control over. The forum in particular does not require an account to read, so a post is as public as an article, and a file attached to a post can be opened by anybody who has its address even where the discussion it sits in is not open to everybody.

Your biography and the photograph on it can be read by anyone else who holds an account here. The people in a group you are in can see that you are in it, and so can whoever runs the group, who can also see which link you joined through while that link still works.

Your profile on the forum, and the forum's list of members, can be read by anybody, with or without an account. You can hide your profile in the forum's own settings.

A website we build for a member is still us. If a member asks for a website under a domain of ours, built from their own entry, what appears on it is what they published here and we are the ones running it. It is another place their material is shown rather than another company receiving it.

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 a mailing list sign-up is stored there, on our own server, and so is your account and everything you publish. Our forum runs on the same servers, and so does the mailbox that takes your replies to it, so a reply you send by e-mail stays in Johannesburg.

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.

We make both of those transfers 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.

Signing in with Google sends nothing about you out of the country, and it is not a transfer we make. Your browser goes to Google's own pages, outside South Africa, and when you come back our own server asks Google who you are. It sends Google nothing about you in order to ask: only the one-time code your browser brought back, and the secret that identifies this site. Those data processing terms do not cover that part. You are using your own Google account, so Google acts for itself there and answers for what it does itself. Google's own privacy policy governs what it does with knowing that you signed in, and you can avoid it by signing in another way.

The Partner Dance Style Identifier sends the sound it hears to ACRCloud, which processes it in the European Economic Area and keeps what it makes from it there. ACRCloud is a company registered outside South Africa, and its terms with us bind it, as our operator, to act only on our instructions and to protect what it receives.

If you pay for Pro or Ultra, PayFast takes the payment. It is based in Cape Town and belongs to Network International, whose registered office is in Dubai, and its terms with us let it pass what it receives to companies in its group and to others, inside or outside South Africa. They do not say to which countries, so we cannot tell you.

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. The fourteen-month clock restarts each time the same person visits again; the two-month one does not, because each event expires on its own date.
• 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.
• E-mail 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.
• A subscription to either of our mailing lists. Until you unsubscribe from that list. Closing your account does not unsubscribe you, and leaving one list leaves you on the other. When you leave a list, we stop sending that list immediately and we keep your address on a record of what you have left 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.
• The forum's record of what you read. One part of it ends and the rest does not. The part that ends is the fullest: a record of each page you open, which carries your internet address and, if you are signed in, your account, alongside the page, the site you came from, your browser and the operating system it reports, an identifier tying together the pages you open in one sitting, the country and the network your address belongs to, and counts of how long you were active on the page and of your mouse movements, clicks, key presses, scrolls and taps. The forum is set to delete all of that about three months after the page was opened. We set it to do that on 23 September 2026. The rest we keep indefinitely, because we have set no period for it and the forum's software does not clear it: that each topic was opened, with your internet address against it if you are not signed in and your account if you are; whose profile you looked at and who looked at yours; a note that somebody reached a topic through a link on another site; and, if you have an account, which topics you read and how far, how long you spent on each post, and the days you came. We read what the forum holds on the forum itself on 23 September 2026, and the three-month period in the forum software's own code.
• 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.

For an account and what you do with it:

• What a sign-in by e-mail leaves behind. The row holding the scrambled copy of your code goes about a day after the code expires, and the code itself expires fifteen minutes after we send it. The record that stops somebody asking for code after code holds your address for an hour.
• The key Google issues as you sign in. We drop it as soon as our server has asked who you are, whether the sign-in worked or failed. Google stops honouring such a key within about an hour of issuing it either way.
• What Google sends about an address we have no account for. It waits in your session while the page that asks your age and the terms is waiting for you. We drop it when you answer that page, either way, and otherwise it goes with the session. Cookies, and the Choice You Have gives how long a session lasts.
• The link between your account and your Google account. For as long as you have the account, or until you take it off yourself on the Sign-In Providers page, which is one of the tabs under Account. It is deleted with the account.
• Your account. For as long as you have it. When you close it we delete the account itself, and we keep only what we need to stop it being made again by mistake and to answer a question about what was done from it. That is a short record with no name and no address in it: a coded form of your address, which lets us check whether an address we are given is the same one and cannot be read back as the address, the dates, who closed the account, and lists of what it wrote and owned, the groups it was in, and what closing took down and kept. We delete that record three years after the account closed. What else stays after you close your account, and for how long, is in the bullets that follow and in the Partner Dance Style Identifier's.
• The forum's copy of your account, once you close yours. If you take your name off your forum posts, the forum renames its copy and clears your e-mail address, your forum profile, and the internet addresses it holds against your account, and its logs of the e-mails it sent you keep your address for 90 days. It does not clear the address on its record of each page you opened, which keeps that until the record itself is deleted about three months after the page. If you keep your name on your posts, the forum's copy keeps your e-mail address, those internet addresses, and your forum profile, which anybody can still read, until you ask us to take your name off. If you later make a new account with the same address, the forum gives that copy back to you, with your posts as you left them, in no groups, and sending you nothing until you turn it back on. Either way, the forum's copy leaves every group it was put in and sends you no more e-mail. Closing your account does not clear the forum's record of what you read. That record stays against the renamed copy, and if you want it gone, ask us.
• What you published. When you close your account, each profile only you look after comes down, and one you look after with somebody else stays up for them, without your pictures. An entry you added to the directory yourself comes down too, unless we have also compiled it from public sources. Your own pictures come off the site, apart from one we used in something we published, which the next bullets cover, and one you attached to a forum post or a chat message, which stays with it. Your profile and your pictures also come down when you ask us. An entry we compiled stays in the directory, because it is a published record that existed before you claimed it.
• A picture that came down when its account closed. We keep the file for thirty days where only we can reach it, so that a picture taken down by mistake can be put back, and then we delete it, with our note of where the file was kept.
• A photograph used in something we published. For as long as that article or issue is published. Taking a picture off your entry does not take it out of a piece that already carries it, and the terms say so.
• The record of what you told us about a picture. For as long as we hold the picture or publish anything carrying it, and for three years after the last of those. The point of the record is to answer a question about a photograph after it has come down, so it has to outlive every use of it rather than the upload.
• What you sent us to claim an entry. Two years after the claim is decided, whether we allowed it or not.
• Your groups. You stay in a group until you leave it, whoever runs it takes you out, you close your account, or the group is deleted. A link made to bring people into a group, and the record of who joined through it and when, are kept until the link stops working. When a friend group passes to the member who has been in it longest, the record of who it passed to and when is kept until that member's account or the group is deleted.
• Forum posts, and the personal messages you sent other members there. Until you or we take one down. Closing your account does not delete them, because other people's conversations would stop making sense. When you close your account on the site we ask whether your name stays on your posts, and at any time you can ask us to take it off.
• Chat on the forum. A chat message in a group's room is deleted 90 days after it was sent, and a personal chat 365 days after it was sent, or sooner if you or we take a message down.
• A post you started in the forum and never sent. 180 days.
• What you search for in the forum. Ninety days.
• The Partner Dance Style Identifier. The songs it found for you, and when you asked, for as long as you have your account. Your votes, ratings and added dances for as long as the shared record exists, with your name taken off them when you close your account, and the measure of how much your votes count stays with them in the same way, linked to them under a number that our record of the closing connects to your account for three years. Your saved playlist readings, collections and notes until you delete them or close your account.
• What you told us under About You. Each answer for as long as you have your account or until you clear it, whichever comes first, and we delete all of it when you close the account. Your votes stay in the shared record under their number, as above, and stop being counted as any kind of dancer's. One thing survives that we cannot undo: a difficulty rating you gave as a teacher still shows that you taught, because only somebody who teaches is asked for one.
• Your telephone number. For as long as you have your account, or until you clear it, and we delete it when you close the account. Clearing the number takes back every permission you gave with it.
• The record that you gave us a permission, or took one back. We keep these without an end, and they outlive the account they belong to, because they are how we show what we were allowed to do and from when. Each one holds what you allowed, the day you allowed it, the version of this notice you read, and whether you answered on the website or in the app. We set no period for them, so this is one of the records that has none.
• What you pay for. The record of each payment for Pro or Ultra, for five years after the payment, because it is a tax record. Which rung you have, and when your last free pass ended, for as long as you have your account.
• The site's own logs. They record when you signed in and from where, and changes made to an account, such as closing it, which they note with the account's name and e-mail address. They are written twice. The copy the site keeps is a running log of the most recent thousand entries, which rolls over on its own, and on 16 September 2026 it reached back two days. A second copy goes to the server's own system log, which is rotated and compressed on the server's schedule rather than ours, and that one is kept for longer than the first.
• Backups. Every night we copy the whole site, and a second server of ours keeps a copy of that, so that we can put things right after a fault. We keep last night's copy, one for each of the last two days, and one for each of the last two Sundays, and the second server keeps the same set. So what you deleted stays in a copy for up to about two weeks, and then it is gone from the backups too.
• The copies we make around our own work. We copy the database before each change to the site's software, so that a change can be undone, and we keep the three most recent of those and delete the rest the same night. The copy made each night also goes to the server of ours that tests those changes, where it replaces the copy from the night before, holds no pictures, and can send no e-mail. It stays there for as long as this site's tests need it.

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 e-mail 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.

Cookies, and the Choice You Have

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

• Necessary. The ones the site cannot work without. For a reader 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. The advertising we sell on our own pages sets nothing either, because it is served from our own server and counted without a cookie. What turning this group on changes is what we are allowed to tell Google, for the advertising we intend to buy on other services. If anything is ever set here, we will list it before it is set.

• Players. Nothing is set until you press play in a YouTube or Spotify player in the Partner Dance Style Identifier. Pressing play loads that service's player, which sets its own cookies, and can carry its own advertising and measurement, under its own privacy notice. This group is on when you arrive, and turning it off keeps every player closed and gives you a link instead.

We read the first three groups off a clean browser on 31 July 2026, and we will read what a player sets when the Identifier carries one, and we will read it again whenever it changes.

Signing in adds one, whose name begins SSESS, so that the site knows it is still you between one page and the next. It is necessary in the strict sense: without it you would be signed out on every click. It is kept for up to 23 days from when you sign in, and a sign-in you have not used for more than two days ends sooner, whenever the site next clears out old ones. It goes when you sign out, and no choice in the panel affects it, because switching it off would mean switching off signing in.

Choosing Continue with Google gives you that same cookie before you are signed in. The site sets it as it sends you to Google, because it is how the site remembers which sign-in you started, and it is kept the same way as the one signing in sets. It stays if you change your mind at Google and never come back, until it runs out or the site clears it as an unused one.

Signing up for one of our mailing lists gives you that same cookie without signing in, and it is kept the same way. The sign-up carries a message back to you once you have sent it, and the cookie is how the site holds that message between the two pages. Sending our contact form sets nothing, because it answers you on the page you sent it from.

Our forum sets its own. forum.stage.africa is a separate piece of software on the same servers. Reading it without signing in sets no cookie unless you use its switch between light and dark, which it remembers in a cookie for a year. It does keep two small notes in your browser's storage, and its software installs a small script of its own, called a service worker, for every visitor. Once you enter it, it keeps you signed in with two cookies: _t, kept until 60 days after your last visit, and _forum_session, which goes when you close your browser. It also remembers in your browser which parts of its side menu you have folded away and, if you choose one, the colour scheme you want on that device. It carries no analytics service from anyone else. The only advertising it shows is our own, and it loads nothing and counts nobody.

We read what signing in sets, on the site and in the forum, on 15 September 2026, and what the forum's own code sets for a reader who is not signed in on 16 September 2026. We sent both of the forms on this site once, on 22 September 2026, to see which of them sets anything. We opened the sign-in page and pressed Continue with Google on 6 October 2026, to see what each of them sets.

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. That last one stays true after you sign in. Having an account does not join what this measurement sees to your name, and we have not connected the two. The forum is different. It keeps its own record of what you read and your account is on it, which The Personal Information We Collect sets out, and nothing in this panel reaches it.

The advertising choice is about Google. It controls whether we may tell Google anything for advertising we buy on other services, and it stays off until you say otherwise. We will not turn it on for you. It does not control the advertisements you see on our own pages, which come from our own server and set nothing in your browser; Analytics and advertising says how those are chosen.

You can switch analytics or players off, or advertising on, using the Cookie Choices control in our footer, on every page. Refusing is as easy as accepting, and if you refuse everything then burtronix_consent is the only cookie left on the site, unless you are signed in, have signed up for a mailing list, or have started a sign-in with Google.

We do not carry other companies' advertising trackers on this site, apart from whatever a YouTube or Spotify player brings once you press play in it.

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.

If you hold an account, four of these work differently and it is better to say so than to let you find out.

• Deleting is not all-or-nothing. Your account and your own pictures go when you ask, and so does a profile only you look after. A profile you look after with somebody else stays up for them, without your pictures, and we will take your own contact details off it if you ask. An entry you added to the directory yourself goes too, unless we have also compiled it from public sources. An entry we compiled stays, because it is a published record that existed before you claimed it. If you want that entry changed or removed, that is a separate request and our corrections page is the route.
• Withdrawing permission for a picture takes it down from your entry and from everything we build from it, including a website we run for you. An article or an issue of our magazine that already carries it stays as it was published, though you can ask us to take the picture out, and a picture of a child comes out when asked. Withdrawing does not reach copies other people made while it was up.
• Forum posts stay unless there is a reason to remove one, because a conversation with one side deleted is not a record of anything. Ask and we will detach your name from yours.
• Your votes, ratings and added dances in the Partner Dance Style Identifier stay in its shared record without your name, because other people's answers are worked out from them. Its section says how, and how to object.

If you are in a photograph somebody else uploaded, you have these rights too and you do not need an account to use them. Write to us, say which picture, and we will take it down while we look into it rather than afterwards.

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):

• E-mail: 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.

If you hold an account we will write to you about a material change rather than leaving you to notice it. If you do not, we have no way to reach you and the page is the notice.

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

Version 1.8, in effect from 8 October 2026 until 9 October 2026.