No accounts, no card details. Here is what we do keep.

Who is responsible

Our Town runs this site from Cape Town, South Africa, and is the responsible party for the information described here. For anything on this page, write to privacy@ourtown.co.za.

What we record when you browse

• A random visitor number, in a cookie. When you open a product page, use a wishlist, or send us a review or a price alert, we set a cookie called ot_viewer holding a random number. It lasts 180 days. It is what makes “customers who viewed this also viewed” and wishlists work. It holds no name and nothing worked out from you or your device.
• Product views. Against that number we record which products you opened and when, with your browser’s user agent and the request details a browser sends about how a page was loaded. We use them for the also-viewed suggestions and to tell shoppers from crawlers. We delete them after 180 days.
• Your cart stays in your browser. It is never stored on our servers. The cart page sends us the product ids in it so we can check the prices are still right.
• Hand-offs to a seller. When you go to a seller’s checkout we log the seller, the items and quantities, the basket value, the time, your browser’s user agent and the same request details. We do not log your IP address or anything that names you. We keep this ledger, and we publish its totals on our Open Stats page. The link to the seller carries a click number, so a sale can be matched to a hand-off in the seller’s own records.
• Your IP address, briefly. We use it to limit how fast one visitor can call our search and adviser, and our host uses it to tell us which country a request came from. We do not store it.

What you choose to give us

• Price alerts. Your email address, the product and the price you saw. We email you a link to confirm, then email you when the price drops. Every alert has a one-tap unsubscribe. An alert that has had nothing to say for 180 days is deleted, and a request you never confirmed is deleted about a week after its link expires.
• Reviews. Your email address, a display name, your rating and what you wrote. The email address is used to confirm the review is yours. It is never shown, and we keep it with the review for as long as the review is up. The display name, rating and text are published. Before publishing, the text is checked by an AI model. A review you never confirmed is deleted about a week after its link expires.
• Wishlists. The name you give a list, the occasion you describe and the products on it, held against your visitor number. If you ask for a designed share page, the occasion text is sent to an AI model to design it. Anyone with a list’s share link can see it. For a shared list we count views, product clicks and cart adds by visitor number, so the owner can see how it did. A list nobody has touched or visited for 12 months is deleted.
• Questions to Ask Our Town. What you type or say to the adviser is sent to an AI model to answer it, and a voice call runs through a voice provider. We do not keep the conversation on our servers. The adviser only answers visitors in South Africa, which is why your country is checked.

Analytics and email

• We run our own analytics server and also use our host’s page-view analytics. They record the pages you view and the actions you take, the site that referred you, any source tag on the link you followed, and your country and device type. A visit is marked once you touch or type on a page, which is how we tell people from automated traffic.
• A price-drop email carries a small image that tells us an email of that kind was opened. It does not tell us who opened it.
• We use no advertising trackers and no advertising cookies.

When you check out with a seller

Payment and delivery happen on each seller’s own store. We pass the seller the items in your cart and a click number, and nothing about you. Your name, address and card go from you straight to them, under their privacy policy, not ours. Some sellers pay us a commission on sales we send.

Who handles information for us

• Vercel hosts the site and provides page-view analytics.
• Supabase hosts our database.
• Railway hosts our analytics server.
• Resend sends our email.
• Anthropic provides the AI model behind the adviser, review checks and wishlist page designs.
• Speechify provides the adviser’s voice calls.
• Shopify supplies the product catalogue.

Some of these store or process information outside South Africa. We do not sell or rent personal information to anyone.

Your choices and rights

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act you may:

• Ask what we hold about you, and ask us to correct or delete it.
• Object to how we use it.
• Stop a price alert with the link in any alert email, and ask us to take down a review.
• Clear your browser’s cookies and site data to drop your visitor number and your cart. Wishlists made under that number can then no longer be edited from that browser.
• Lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator at inforegulator.org.za.

Write to privacy@ourtown.co.za for any of these. Because we hold no accounts, we may ask for the email address you used, so we can find the right alert or review.

Changes to this page

When what we collect or how we use it changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves.