BuzzMaker Privacy Policy

1. Introduction and Scope

This Privacy Policy explains how Buzzplug (Pty) Ltd, trading as BuzzMaker™ ("BuzzMaker", "we", "us", "our") collects, uses, shares, retains and protects Personal Information in connection with the BuzzMaker platform, including the website at buzzmaker.co.za and related domains, our mobile and installable web applications, and all associated features and services (collectively, the "Platform").

This Policy is incorporated into, and forms part of, our Terms and Conditions. Where a term is capitalised here and not separately defined, it has the meaning given to it in the Terms and Conditions, available at buzzmaker.co.za/terms. Where this Policy and the Terms and Conditions describe the same processing, this Policy is the more detailed statement and governs to the extent of any difference on privacy matters specifically.

We process Personal Information in accordance with the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 ("POPIA"), and this Policy is written to satisfy the notification requirements of section 18 of POPIA. Where you deal with us from outside South Africa, POPIA and South African law nonetheless govern our processing, since the Platform and its infrastructure operate from and are directed at South Africa.

2. Who We Are and How to Contact Us

We are the Responsible Party, as defined in POPIA, for the Personal Information described in this Policy. Where an Organiser receives Attendee information through the Platform, the Organiser acts as a separate, independent Responsible Party for its own use of that information — see section 11 (Who We Share Your Information With) and section 15.5 of the Terms and Conditions.

3. Definitions

4. Information We Collect

4.1 Account and profile data: display name, email address, mobile number, date of birth and derived age, gender, bio, avatar, profile photos and captions, city, suburb, province, country, and timezone.

4.2 Preferences and interests: interests, topics, music genres, preferred event types, "looking for" settings, archetypes, and availability status, together with the vector embeddings we derive from them for matching and recommendations — see section 10 (Automated Decision-Making, Recommendations and AI).

4.3 Location data: device coordinates, a geospatial point, and the suburb we resolve from it — collected only with your device permission and your recorded location consent. See section 8 (Location Data and Visibility Controls).

4.4 Event activity: saved Events, expressed interest, RSVPs, Tickets, Ticket Tiers, Sessions, check-in times and scanning records, reviews, comments and likes.

4.5 Social activity: swipes, matches, conversations, messages and reactions, blocks, reports, Vibes, and Crew Invites.

4.6 Commercial data: payments, ledger entries, payouts, subscriptions, promo code usage, promotional spend, payment gateway customer identifiers, and — for Organisers — bank account and payout verification details.

4.7 Identity and biometric verification records, where you use a feature gated by identity verification. See section 9 (Biometric Information).

4.8 Consent and audit records, including the IP address and user agent captured at the time you give or withdraw a consent.

4.9 Technical data: device and browser information, log, metric and trace data, analytics events, session replay recordings of on-screen activity, and error reports, collected automatically as you use the Platform. See section 7 (Cookies and Similar Technologies) for how session replay works.

4.10 Referral and attribution data: where you arrive at an Event through one of the Platform's tracked one-click share links (Instagram, TikTok or WhatsApp), which of those channels brought you, recorded against the resulting Ticket purchase so an Organiser can measure the effectiveness of its own promotion of the Event — see section 11.2 (Who We Share Your Information With).

5. How We Use Your Information and Our Lawful Bases

5.1 We only process Personal Information where we have a lawful basis under POPIA to do so. Our lawful bases are set out below, against the purposes they support.

5.3 We do not sell your Personal Information to any third party, and we do not use your private messages to train third-party general-purpose AI models.

6. Consent — Given, Granular and Revocable

6.1 Where we rely on your consent, that consent is granular: your consent to one type of processing (for example, location) is independent of your consent to another (for example, marketing). Consenting to one does not consent to the others.

6.2 Every consent you give or withdraw is written to a consent log recording the type of consent, the action taken, the value set, and the time. This log is itself Personal Information and is retained under section 13 (Data Retention).

6.3 You can withdraw consent at any time through your in-app privacy and notification settings, or by writing to support@buzzmaker.co.za. Withdrawing consent stops the associated processing prospectively; it does not affect the lawfulness of processing that already took place while consent was in force.

6.4 Defaults are set conservatively and are never widened on your behalf. Consent flags for location, marketing, demographic-insight sharing and third-party sharing default to off. Where we introduce a new sharing feature, it is off until you turn it on.

6.5 Some processing does not depend on consent because it is necessary to perform our contract with you or because we are legally obliged to carry it out — see section 5 (How We Use Your Information and Our Lawful Bases). You cannot opt out of that processing while continuing to use the feature it supports, though you can always close your account.

7. Cookies and Similar Technologies

7.1 We use cookies and similar local-storage technologies for authentication, session persistence, security, remembering your preferences, and product analytics.

7.2 Essential cookies are required for the Platform to function — for example, the session token that keeps you signed in — and cannot be disabled without preventing sign-in. Analytics cookies help us understand how the Platform is used in aggregate; you can control these through your browser settings, though blocking them may degrade some functionality.

7.3 We do not use cookies for third-party behavioural advertising, and we do not permit advertising networks to place tracking cookies on the Platform.

7.4 We record a sample of sessions as a replay of on-screen activity, for debugging and abuse investigation. Form inputs are masked in these replays; rendered text on screen is not fully masked, so page and message content may appear in a recorded session.

8. Location Data and Visibility Controls

8.1 With your device permission and your recorded location consent, we collect your approximate or precise location to show nearby Events, place Events on the map, resolve your suburb, and improve recommendations.

8.2 You can withdraw device location permission at any time in your device settings, and your location consent within the Platform at any time in your privacy settings. Core browsing continues to work without location access, with reduced relevance in what is shown to you.

8.3 Your coordinates are converted into a suburb name through our mapping and geocoding provider. Whether your suburb is shown to other Users is controlled separately by your suburb visibility setting. Distances shown to other Users are computed in a privacy-preserving way and are not a live position feed — we do not broadcast your real-time location to other Users, and we do not offer any feature that shows your live position on a map to anyone else.

8.4 You control, at minimum: profile visibility, attendance visibility, demographic visibility and suburb visibility — each settable to everyone, matches only, organisers only, or nobody — together with whether you appear in social proof and checked-in counts, whether you are excluded from the matching pool, who may message you, whether you require approval before being added to a Crew Chat, whether your online status is visible, and whether Organisers may view your profile or contact you.

8.5 Demographic information shared with Organisers for Event insights is aggregated and subject to a minimum-cohort threshold set per Event, so that small groups are not re-identifiable. Sharing demographics for insights is a separate, revocable consent, and revoking it removes you from future aggregates.

8.6 Blocking a User overrides visibility settings in that User's favour: a blocked User cannot see you in discovery, matching, social proof or attendee lists, and cannot message you.

9. Biometric Information

9.1 Certain features — principally Organiser onboarding, payout enablement, and trust-and-safety escalations — require identity verification using a facial biometric check performed through our third-party verification provider, VerifyNow (verifynow.co.za). This involves capturing a live selfie, a passive liveness check, and a face-match comparison against a stored reference photograph.

9.2 Biometric information is special personal information under section 26 of POPIA and receives heightened protection. We process it only on the basis of your express, specific and informed consent, given at the point of capture, and we record the fact and timestamp of that consent, together with the version of this Policy and the Terms in force at the time. Verification is optional: declining it means the gated features remain unavailable, but it does not affect your general use of the Platform.

9.3 We store your reference photograph, the verification outcome, a confidence score, provider reference identifiers, the verification context, and any warnings returned. Provider responses are sanitised before storage, and we do not receive or store the provider's underlying biometric templates. Records are kept in full for 60 days from the verification for audit and billing purposes; after that, sensitive fields (the provider reference, confidence score and sanitised response) are automatically redacted, though the record itself is not deleted where retaining it is needed to evidence compliance or billing history — see section 13 (Data Retention).

9.4 Where a reference photograph is periodically refreshed so that verification remains accurate as your appearance changes, the refresh follows a policy with minimum-score thresholds and a cooldown period, and each refresh is recorded in a dedicated promotion audit trail. The previous reference is superseded, not retained alongside the new one.

9.5 You can withdraw your biometric consent at any time by contacting support@buzzmaker.co.za. On withdrawal, we delete the reference photograph and cease biometric processing; verification-dependent features will be disabled, and we may retain a minimal, non-biometric record that a verification occurred where we need it for fraud prevention or legal compliance. Withdrawals are counted and audited.

9.6 Verification results are indicative and can produce false accepts or false rejects, and accuracy can vary between individuals. An adverse automated verification result may be reviewed by a person on request — see section 10 (Automated Decision-Making, Recommendations and AI).

10. Automated Decision-Making, Recommendations and AI

10.1 We use automated processing to rank and recommend Events and Users, to compute Buzz Score and social-proof metrics, to generate vector embeddings of profiles and Event descriptions, to score candidate matches against ranking weights in a dedicated recommendation service, to assist Organisers with drafting listing copy, and to generate Event cover artwork. Some of these features send data to third-party AI providers, which act as Operators under section 11 (Who We Share Your Information With).

10.2 Recommendations, rankings and match suggestions are automated, approximate and imperfect, and carry no assurance of compatibility, safety, suitability or accuracy.

10.3 "Ask The Buzz" is an optional question-and-answer feature on an Event page. Your question, a short recent-conversation history, and factual details about that Event — including its description, category, tags, venue, pricing, engagement statistics, and a small number of recent public comments and reviews — are sent to Google's Gemini large language model to generate a reply. It is not used to make any decision about you.

10.4 Section 71 of POPIA restricts decisions with legal or substantially similar effect being made solely by automated processing. Where an automated process — for example an identity verification result, a fraud signal, a payout hold, or an account restriction — would materially affect you, you may request that a person review it by writing to support@buzzmaker.co.za. We will provide the reasons for the decision, give you an opportunity to make representations, and have the outcome reconsidered by a person who was not responsible for the original automated decision.

10.5 "Connect AI" is an optional feature, available on our Pro plan, that lets an Organiser authorise their own Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini account to read and manage that Organiser's own Events through BuzzMaker. Unlike "Ask The Buzz" (section 10.3), BuzzMaker does not call any AI provider itself as part of this feature — the Organiser's own, already-authorised AI client calls BuzzMaker directly, and that client's own AI provider is what may retain or process the response as part of the Organiser's conversation with it. Connect AI never discloses an Attendee's name, contact details or payment information; event-level information it can return includes the Organiser's own Event details, aggregate sales totals, and aggregate attendance and demographic figures (shown only where a group is large enough that no individual Attendee could be identified from it). Connect AI requires the Organiser's separate consent at connection time — see section 12.3 (Cross-Border Transfers) — and can be disconnected at any time from the Organiser dashboard.

11. Who We Share Your Information With

11.1 Other Users. Depending on your visibility settings, other Users may see your profile, your Event activity, and — where a Match exists, or where you have been added to a shared Crew Chat — your messages with them. A Crew Chat does not require a Match: any User may add another User to a Crew Chat directly by display name, unless the User being added has turned on "require approval for Crew Chat invites", in which case they must accept a pending invite first. Blocking prevents a User from adding you to, or remaining in a shared, Crew Chat with you. A poll posted in a Crew Chat is not anonymous: your vote is visible to every other member of that Crew Chat once cast. Organisers of Events you attend may see the attendee information appropriate to running that Event, as described in section 15.4 of the Terms and Conditions.

11.2 Organisers, as a separate Responsible Party. Attendee Personal Information made available to an Organiser through rosters, scanning tools, manifest exports or CRM views may be used by that Organiser only for direct management of its Event. In relation to that data, the Organiser processes it as an independent Responsible Party under POPIA and is separately responsible for its own compliance — see section 15.5 of the Terms and Conditions. Where an Organiser imports historical sales and attendance data for an Event from another platform, only aggregate statistics are retained — no individually identifiable attendee record is kept from that import — and the Organiser must confirm it has a lawful basis for the import before it is committed. Where you arrived at an Event through one of our tracked one-click share links, the Organiser also sees which channel (Instagram, TikTok or WhatsApp) is associated with your purchase, recorded against that purchase rather than your profile generally — see section 4.10 (Information We Collect).

11.3 Our Operators. We use third-party service providers to run the Platform, each of which processes Personal Information only on our documented instructions and under a written agreement as required by section 21 of POPIA. As at the effective date of this Policy, these fall into the following categories: cloud database, authentication, file storage and serverless functions; application hosting and content delivery; payment processing and payouts through our payment gateway — depending on the Organiser's settlement configuration, BuzzMaker either collects ticket payments from Attendees and pays the Organiser out of those collections, or the gateway settles the Organiser's share of each sale directly; identity and biometric verification, through VerifyNow (see section 9); mapping, search and geocoding; media processing and transcoding — including private chat video as well as public Vibes; transactional email delivery; push notification delivery; product analytics; third-party observability, error and performance monitoring; and AI providers, including Google (Gemini), used for text embeddings, drafting assistance, image generation, and the "Ask The Buzz" event Q&A feature described in section 10.3.

11.4 Legal and safety disclosures. We may disclose account information where required by a court order, subpoena, statutory demand or other lawful process, or where we reasonably believe disclosure is necessary to prevent imminent harm to a person. Where we are lawfully permitted to notify you of such a request, we will endeavour to do so.

11.5 Business transfers. If BuzzMaker is involved in a merger, acquisition, restructuring or sale of assets, Personal Information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to the transferee being bound by commitments materially consistent with this Policy.

11.6 We do not sell Personal Information to data brokers or advertisers, and we do not share it with any third party for that third party's own independent marketing purposes without your separate consent.

11.7 Where an Organiser uses Connect AI (section 10.5), the Organiser's own chosen AI provider — Anthropic, OpenAI or Google, depending on which AI client the Organiser connects — receives the Event and insights data that client requests on the Organiser's behalf. This provider acts on the instructions of, and is a party chosen by, the Organiser for the Organiser's own account; it does not receive Attendee names, contact details or payment information.

12. Cross-Border Transfers

12.1 Several of the Operators listed in section 11 (Who We Share Your Information With) process Personal Information outside South Africa.

12.2 Where Personal Information is transferred across South Africa's borders, we do so in accordance with section 72 of POPIA — on the basis of your consent, the necessity of the transfer for the performance of our contract with you, or a binding agreement with the recipient providing an adequate level of protection substantially similar to POPIA.

12.3 For Connect AI (section 10.5) specifically, the basis we rely on under section 72 of POPIA is the Organiser's own consent. We record this consent at the moment the Organiser is shown, and agrees to, the Connect AI authorisation screen — stated there in those words — and keep a timestamped record of it, separate from and in addition to the authorisation itself, which the Organiser can revoke at any time from their dashboard.

13. Data Retention

13.1 We keep Personal Information only for as long as necessary for the purpose it was collected for, or as required by law, and no longer.

13.2 Our retention periods, by category of information, are:

13.3 See section 18 (What Happens When You Delete Your Account) for how these schedules interact with a deletion or erasure request.

14. Security Measures

14.1 We apply technical and organisational safeguards appropriate to the risk, including row-level security in the database, role-scoped access tokens, encryption in transit, restricted and audited administrative access, rate limiting, secure secret management, and centralised logging and monitoring.

14.2 Access to Personal Information within BuzzMaker is limited to personnel who need it to do their job, and administrative access to sensitive records — including messages — is logged. See section 20 (Administrative Access and Moderation).

14.3 No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. You are responsible for the security of the device and network you use to access the Platform, and for keeping your account credentials confidential.

14.4 If you discover a security vulnerability affecting the Platform, please report it privately to support@buzzmaker.co.za — see section 32 of the Terms and Conditions for our vulnerability disclosure process.

15. Data Breach Notification

15.1 If a security compromise occurs that has compromised or may have compromised the confidentiality, integrity or availability of your Personal Information, we will notify the Information Regulator and affected data subjects as soon as reasonably possible after establishing the scope of the compromise, as required by section 22 of POPIA.

15.2 Notification to you will describe, to the extent we know it, what happened, what information was involved, what we are doing about it, and what you can do to protect yourself.

16. Your Rights Under POPIA

Subject to POPIA and its exceptions, you have the right to:

• Request confirmation of whether we hold Personal Information about you, and access to that information, free of charge for a first request in a given period.
• Request details of any third party who has had access to your Personal Information.
• Request correction of Personal Information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete, misleading or obtained unlawfully.
• Request deletion or destruction of Personal Information that we are no longer authorised to retain.
• Object, on reasonable grounds, to processing based on our legitimate interests, unless the law requires the processing to continue.
• Withdraw any consent you have given, at any time, without affecting processing already carried out while consent was in force.
• Object to your Personal Information being processed for direct marketing purposes, at any time and without charge.
• Request that a human review a decision that was based solely on automated processing and that materially affects you.
• Lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator — see section 23 (Complaints and the Information Regulator).

17. How to Exercise Your Rights

17.1 Many of your rights can be exercised directly, without contacting us, through your in-app profile, privacy and notification settings — including correcting most profile fields, adjusting or withdrawing location, marketing, organiser-communication and demographic-sharing consent, adjusting visibility settings, and unsubscribing from marketing.

17.2 For anything else — including access requests, deletion requests, objections, requests for human review of an automated decision, and withdrawing biometric consent (section 9 (Biometric Information)) — write to support@buzzmaker.co.za, addressed to the Information Officer.

17.3 We will deal with your request within a reasonable time, ordinarily within 30 days. We may ask you to verify your identity before acting on a request, to protect your information from being disclosed to the wrong person. If we refuse a request, we will tell you why.

17.4 Certain profile fields — including date of birth — are not freely self-editable after onboarding, in order to preserve the integrity of our 18+ age gate. Contact support@buzzmaker.co.za if a genuine correction is needed to one of these fields.

18. What Happens When You Delete Your Account

18.1 You can request account deletion at any time from your profile settings, or by contacting support@buzzmaker.co.za.

18.2 Requesting deletion deactivates your account immediately and starts a restore window — currently 60 days, though we may adjust that period from time to time. Nothing is erased during this window: if you sign back in and choose to restore your account before the window ends, it is reinstated exactly as it was, with nothing lost. The account remains deactivated and inaccessible to other Users throughout.

18.3 If the restore window lapses without you restoring the account, erasure is then carried out: we redact your profile — display name, avatar, bio, email address, mobile number, date of birth, suburb, precise location and derived embeddings — delete your attendance records, saved Events, matches, Vibes, profile photos and block lists, and anonymise your identifier on financial and ticket-sale records that we are legally required to keep, rather than deleting those records outright. Your account's email address is then freed for reuse, including for signing up again as a new account. The erasure event is itself recorded in our consent log.

18.4 This is by design, not an oversight: complete destruction of financial records is not lawfully available to us while our tax and accounting retention obligations apply — see section 13 (Data Retention). Content that appears in another User's conversation history, or in an Event's public record, may also persist in de-identified form after your account is erased.

18.5 Copies of your information may also remain in backups until they age out on their own rolling cycle, described in section 13 (Data Retention).

19. Direct Marketing and Notifications

19.1 We send transactional messages that are necessary for the service — account, security, ticket and payment messages — by email, push notification and in-app notification. These are not direct marketing and cannot be fully disabled while your account is open, although channel-level controls, notification levels and quiet hours are available.

19.2 Organiser announcement emails and post-Event review-prompt emails are direct marketing, sent only where you have opted in (respectively, "allow organiser communications" and review prompts in your settings), or as otherwise permitted by section 69 of POPIA and section 45 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002. Every marketing email carries a one-click unsubscribe link that requires no login and takes effect immediately, in addition to the setting itself. Unsubscribing suppresses all direct marketing to that email address, not only the message you unsubscribed from, and the suppression is retained even after account deletion so the address is not resubscribed by a future data import.

19.3 Organiser communications to you are controlled by your "allow organiser communications" setting and are limited to Events you have engaged with. Organisers may not use Platform data to contact you outside the Platform without a separate lawful basis.

19.4 Push notifications depend on a subscription registered by your browser or device and on a third-party delivery provider, and delivery is not guaranteed.

20. Administrative Access and Moderation

20.1 A limited number of BuzzMaker personnel hold administrative roles that permit them to view and manage accounts, Events and Vibes, act on reports, and apply enforcement measures. Roles are assigned explicitly, enforced in the database, and kept to the minimum necessary.

20.2 Administrative actions — including role changes, account suspensions, content removals and access to User records — are written to an administrative audit log recording who acted, what was acted on, and when.

20.3 Administrative access to private content, including messages, is limited to what is strictly necessary to investigate a report, enforce our Terms and Conditions, comply with a lawful request, or protect the safety of a person. It is not used for curiosity, commercial purposes or profiling. Messages are transmitted and stored on our infrastructure, encrypted in transit and protected by database access controls, but they are not end-to-end encrypted.

21. Children

21.1 The Platform is strictly for persons aged 18 years or older, and is not intended for and is not offered to anyone under 18. We collect your date of birth at onboarding and use it to enforce this restriction.

21.2 We do not knowingly collect or process the Personal Information of children. If we learn that we have done so, we will delete it and terminate the associated account.

22. Changes to This Policy

22.1 We may update this Policy from time to time. The version number and effective date at the top of this document identify the current version.

22.2 Where a change is material — for example, a change to what we collect, why we process it, or who we share it with — we will give reasonable advance notice by email or in-app notification before it takes effect.

22.3 Continued use of the Platform after the effective date of a non-material change constitutes acceptance of the updated Policy.

23. Complaints and the Information Regulator

23.1 If you are unhappy with how we have processed your Personal Information, please raise it with us first at support@buzzmaker.co.za, addressed to the Information Officer. We aim to acknowledge within 5 Business Days and to resolve within 15 Business Days.

23.2 If we cannot resolve your concern, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa) at any time — nothing in this Policy requires you to complain to us first.