Privacy Policy

We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy applies to clients, homesitters and your use of our site. The same definitions apply.

The company is obliged to collect and process personal data. The company is committed to being transparent about how it collects and uses that data and to meeting its data protection obligations. Homesitters (Pty) Ltd is in compliance with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI Act) –  POPIA and allows us to process your personal data to enable us to manage the homesit, to match client specific needs (home location, pets, your specific requests….) with our team of homesitters, and to source best options per client mission.

We undertake to ensure that there is no unwarranted impact upon you, that we are fair, transparent and accountable.

Please read the following carefully to understand our practices regarding your personal Information and how we will treat it. If you do not agree with this Privacy Policy, please do not use our site.

Data Controller
For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the Act), the Data Compliance Officer is Rebecca Irvine.

Information we may collect from you
Please do not submit your personal information to us if you are not agreeable to our collection of it. By using our site you are agreeing that we may collect and process the following Information about you (without limitation):

• Personal information such as name, address and contact details, property information, housesitting requirements, dates of availability etc. that you provide by filling in forms on our site and otherwise by corresponding with us via or in connection with our site;
• Other details of your visits to our site including, but not limited to, traffic data, search criteria, location data, weblogs and other communication data, and the resources that you access; and
• Automatically collected data from your visits to the site, which may involve the use of cookies and web beacons which allow us to facilitate your convenient use of our site and to enhance user experience developments. (Please note that you may refuse to accept cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the use of cookies. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our site).

Uses made of your Information
We use Information held about you in the following ways:

Your information will be shared internally with members of the head office team including Administrators and Administrative Coordinators and relevant information externally with homesitters.

The company will not transfer your data to counties outside the UK.

Data Security and Protections
The company takes the security of your data very seriously. The company has internal policies and controls in place to try to ensure that your data is not lost, accidentally destroyed, misused or disclosed, and is not accessed except by its employees in the performance of their duties.

Where the company engages third parties to process personal data on its behalf, they do so on the basis of written instructions, are under a duty of confidentiality and are obliged to implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure the security of data.

For how long does the company keep data?
The company will hold client personal data for the duration of the booking periods. The period for which client data is held after the end of the last booking is 6 years after which we will delete their personal data file.

Your rights
As a data subject, you have a number of rights. You can:

• Access and obtain a copy of your data on request;
• Require the company to change incorrect or incomplete data;
• Require the company to delete or stop processing your data, for example where the data is no longer necessary for the purposes of processing;
• Object to the processing of your data where the company is relying on its legitimate interests as the legal ground for processing; and
• Ask the company to stop processing data for a period if data is inaccurate or there is a dispute about whether or not your interests override the company’s legitimate grounds for processing data.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact Rebecca Irvine, Data Protection Compliance Officer, Homesitters Ltd. You can make a subject access request by completing the company’s form for making a subject access request.

If you believe that the company has not complied with your data protection rights, you can complain to the Information Commissioner.

Third party privacy policies
Our site may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of our advertisers and affiliates. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any Information to these websites.

Use of Google Maps
This website uses Google Maps API for the visual display of geographical information. During the use of Google Maps, Google also collects, processes and uses data on the visitor’s use of the map function. More detailed information on the processing of data by Google can be found at Google data privacy notices. In the data protection center there you can also change your personal data protection settings.

Changes to our Privacy Policy
Any changes we may make to our Privacy Policy in the future will be posted on this page and, where we consider appropriate, we may notify you by email in advance of their application.