South Africa's POPIA compliance and your Flex real estate website
With South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) taking effect on 1 July, you need to ensure that your business complies with all the relevant local laws. As a service provider, Entegral has taken steps to ensure websites provide compliance and will continue to roll out enhancements where required, to enable you to be fully compliant.
Every business collects and processes client data in various ways and it can differ dramatically between companies. Since Flex is one of the most customisable real estate platforms out there, many clients have for instance implemented custom forms, implemented credit card payment gateways, or have done custom CRM and other chat integrations that can collect client and process information. Many Flex websites are also powered by different CRM systems, and not only by Entegral's Base CRM.
It would therefore be foolish to deploy a generic POPI compliance solution for all our clients and assume that it will work for everyone. With Entegral not only operating in South Africa alone, we've decided to rather provide the required tools to assist with your POPI compliance from a website perspective, and let business owners implement a customised POPI compliance that suits their needs:
- Privacy Policies: You can provide your own privacy policy to be added to your website (free update) or opt for an Entegral's updated generic privacy policy (R199 once-off fee) handcrafted by our lawyers. This is implemented in your website footer as a link. We can also refer you to our attorneys to help with a custom policy for your business. Privacy policies should be sculptured around what client data you capture and how you process this data. For standard Flex websites, client data is collected in forms (e.g. a property enquiry that collects name, telephone and email details). No personal client data is stored in cookies.
- Cookie Notice: We can implement a generic cookie notice (popup that displays) that notifies visitors that cookies are used to improve the user experience and are essential for your website, with a link to your privacy policy, containing the cookie disclosure, and a close button. The generic cookie popup can be added for a once-off fee of R199. If you require a custom cookie popup with different wording and actions, please email us for a custom quote.
- Flex Newsletters and Property Alerts: Entegral already follows best practices with website email subscriptions and double opt-in and opt-out mechanisms are already part of your Flex functionality. Your clients can unsubscribe from subscription communications at any time.
- Additional privacy policy notice on forms: We will include additional wording on your website forms just above any form submit buttons that link to your privacy policy: "By sending, you agree to our Privacy Policy". This will be included by default for new websites and rolled out to existing websites. if you have a custom websites with custom forms, a quote will be provided if required.
- Entegral furthermore complies with POPIA obligations with respect to the privacy and safeguarding of data, including continuous backups and disaster recovery procedures. As a fully independent company, no data is sold or passed on to any external sources without your consent. We furthermore are an accredited domain registrar and use a state-of-the-art DNS system to further help protect client websites and data. Our latest Flex real estate platform has achieved an industry best 100% uptime since its launch in 2018. All Flex websites have SSL enabled, which allows browsing via the HTTPS protocol. All personal information submitted by your clients are therefor encrypted.