Cookie notice

The short version

This site sets no advertising cookies, no tracking cookies and no social media pixels. We do not profile you, we do not follow you to other websites, and we do not sell anything about you to anybody.

We have built it this way deliberately, and it is why you are not being asked to dismiss a consent banner.

What a cookie is, briefly

A small file a website asks your browser to store, so it can recognise something on a later visit. The same rules apply to similar technologies such as local storage, pixels and device fingerprinting.

What this site does

Our analytics. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see how many people visit, which pages they read and how quickly pages load. Cloudflare’s documentation states that its analytics script does not store any data in your browser and does not access cookies, local storage, session storage, your IP address or IndexedDB. It reports aggregate numbers, such as how many visits came from South Africa, and it does not give us anything that identifies you.

Form protection. When you use our contact form we use Cloudflare Turnstile to tell a person from an automated script. Turnstile receives your IP address, a technical fingerprint of your browser’s connection, and the address of the page you are on. Cloudflare acts as our processor and its documentation confirms that Turnstile does not access, store or transmit the contents of your message or anything else you type.

Cloudflare does not publish whether Turnstile stores anything in your browser, and we would rather tell you that than claim a certainty we do not have.

Hosting. Cloudflare, which hosts the site, processes the IP address and technical details of every request in order to deliver and protect the site. We keep no access logs of our own. Our form handler records errors, without the content of any message, so we can fix faults.

Booking a call. If you click through to book a time, you leave our site and arrive on a Google page. What happens there is governed by Google’s own terms and privacy policy, not ours.

What this site does not do

No Google Analytics. No Meta or LinkedIn pixel. No advertising or retargeting network. No heatmap or session recording tool. No chat widget. No embedded video or social feed. No third-party fonts loaded from another company’s server; ours are served from our own site.

If we ever add something that changes this, we will update this notice before it goes live and reconsider whether consent is required.

Why there is no consent banner

South Africa has no law equivalent to the European ePrivacy rules, which are what produce cookie banners in Europe. There is no statute or regulation here that requires consent before a cookie is stored on a device, and the Information Regulator has published no guidance on cookies or online tracking.

What South African law regulates is the processing of personal information, under POPIA. So the question is not whether a cookie is set but whether personal information is being processed and on what basis.

On this site, the analytics tool stores nothing on your device and assigns you no identifier, so it does not process personal information about you. The form protection and the server logs do involve your IP address, and we rely on section 11(1)(f) of POPIA, our legitimate interest in keeping the site secure and working, which is disclosed here as section 18 requires.

That is the whole basis for the position. If the law changes, or if we add a tool that sets a persistent identifier, we will revisit it and say so.

Controlling cookies yourself

Your browser will let you block or delete cookies and similar storage. Because we do not rely on any, blocking them will not stop the site working.

Questions

Write to the Information Officer at hello@widbrookconsulting.co.za.