Privacypolicy

Michael Pienaar, trading as MIAX, is the Responsible Party for the personal information described here, as that term is used in the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). Full details of who we are, and where we are, are in the last section of this page.

Our Information Officer is Michael Pienaar. Anything in this policy, including a request to see or delete what we hold, goes to ai@miax.co.za, which is read by a person.

There are only three ways this site collects anything.

If you send an enquiry — through the form or through the assistant — we collect your name, your email address, and whatever you chose to write about your business. We also record the page you arrived from, so we know which parts of the site are doing their job.

If you use the assistant, the conversation itself is collected, because it has to be sent somewhere to be answered. If you give the assistant your name and email in the course of that conversation, it is treated as an enquiry and handled exactly as above. That is the one thing about the assistant most people do not expect, so it is said plainly here and again on the page it runs on.

If we contact you first, we will hold your business contact details and where we found them. See section 07.

We do not ask for and have no use for your identity number, address, banking details, race, health, religion, politics, biometrics or anything else POPIA treats as special personal information under section 26. Please do not send those to us. If you do, we will delete them rather than file them.

POPIA requires a lawful basis under section 11 rather than a good intention. Ours are: your consent, which you give by choosing to send an enquiry, and which you can withdraw at any time; the steps leading to a contract with you, where the enquiry becomes a quote and a piece of work; and our legitimate interests in replying to people who ask us things and in keeping a record of work we have quoted.

We use it to reply to you, to prepare for a call, to quote, and to keep our own record of that. We do not use it for anything else, and POPIA does not let us decide later that we have thought of a new purpose.

Four companies are involved because the site cannot work without them. Each is an Operator acting on our instructions, none of them owns your information, and none of them may use it for their own purposes.

• Anthropic(United States) generates the assistant's replies. What you type into the assistant is sent to them for that purpose.
• Resend (United States) delivers the enquiry email to our inbox, and delivers email we send you.
• Vercel (United States and European Union) hosts the site and stores enquiries. This is where your enquiry actually comes to rest.
• Google (United States) receives our email, because our mailbox is there. Anything you send us is therefore also sitting in a mailbox.

We do not sell your information, we do not trade it, and we do not hand it to anyone who is not helping us reply to you. If a court or a law requires us to disclose something, we will, and we will tell you unless we are forbidden to.

All four of those companies process information outside South Africa. Section 72 of POPIA allows that where the recipient is subject to a law or a binding agreement that provides an adequate level of protection, or where you consent to it. Each of them is engaged under a data processing agreement on those terms, and by sending us an enquiry you agree to that transfer.

If you would rather nothing left the country, do not use the form or the assistant. Email or phone us instead — although you should know that our mailbox is hosted abroad too, which is why it is listed above rather than quietly left out.

Enquiries are kept for as long as there is a reasonable prospect of working together, and then no longer. In practice that is up to 24 months from your last contact with us, after which the enquiry is deleted.

Where we have actually done work for you, the records that go with it are kept for five years after the work ends, because tax and company law require it. Assistant conversations that never became an enquiry are not stored by us at all beyond your own browser session.

We do sometimes contact businesses that have not contacted us, so here is exactly how, because that is more useful to you than a reassurance.

The address comes from the business's own website — we read the contact page the business published and take the address it put there. We do not buy contact lists, we do not use lists from anyone else, and we do not use personal addresses. Every message we send says who we are and carries an unsubscribe link. One click puts the address on a suppression list and nothing reaches it again, ever, including from a later campaign.

Section 69 of POPIA governs this and it is stricter than most senders behave as though it is: direct marketing by electronic communication to someone who is not already a customer requires their consent, and consent may be requested only once, in a prescribed form. A published business address is not consent. We are telling you this rather than implying the practice is clearly permitted, because it sits in an area the Act does not obviously allow, and you are entitled to know that from us rather than from a lawyer.

If you have had something from us you did not want: click the unsubscribe link, reply to it, or write to ai@miax.co.za. Any of the three stops it permanently, and you do not have to give a reason.

This site sets no cookies at all on its public pages. No analytics, no advertising pixel, no session cookie, no third-party script that follows you anywhere. One entry is written to your browser's own local storage if you dismiss the notice at the bottom of the screen, so that it stops appearing; it holds no identifier and is never sent to us. That is a measured statement rather than a hopeful one, and the cookie policy explains how it was measured and what the one exception is.

The assistant is useful for working out where automation would save you time, and it is wrong sometimes, in the way that all software of this kind is wrong sometimes. Do not treat what it says as professional, financial or legal advice, and check anything that matters with a person before acting on it.

Do not put anything confidential into it. It is a conversation with a machine that forwards what you say to a company in another country, and it is not the right place for a trade secret, a client's information, or anyone's personal details other than your own.

Section 71 of POPIA restricts decisions made about you purely automatically. Nothing here makes one. The assistant answers questions and passes enquiries to a person; every decision about whether to quote, what to charge and whether to take on work is made by a human being.

Section 19 of POPIA requires appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational measures rather than a promise of perfection. Ours: everything is served over HTTPS; credentials live in a managed secret store and never in the code; stored enquiries are private and not publicly addressable; the operations dashboard is behind a login; and access is limited to the people who need it to reply to you.

If personal information is ever accessed by someone who should not have it, section 22 requires us to notify the Information Regulator and to notify you, as soon as reasonably possible. We will.

POPIA gives you rights, and they are not difficult to use here.

• See it. Ask what we hold about you and we will tell you (sections 23 and 24).
• Fix it. Ask us to correct anything wrong (section 24).
• Delete it. Ask us to destroy it, and we will unless a law requires us to keep it (section 24).
• Object. Object to us processing it on legitimate interests (section 11(3)).
• Withdraw consent. At any time, without giving a reason (section 11(2)).
• Stop marketing. Immediately and permanently (section 69).

Write to ai@miax.co.za and we will do it. There is no charge and no form to fill in. We aim to answer within a few working days and will not take longer than 30.

Tell us first, because it is usually faster. If that does not settle it, you have the right to complain to the regulator, and here is how rather than a sentence saying that you may.

• Information Regulator (South Africa)
• Complaints: complaints.IR@justice.gov.za
• Enquiries: enquiries.IR@justice.gov.za
• JD House, 27 Stiemens Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 2001
• inforegulator.org.za

This site is for people running businesses and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 18. Section 34 of POPIA prohibits processing a child's information without proper authorisation, so if we learn we are holding any, we delete it.

If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. Where a change is material — a new processor, a new purpose, anything that widens what we collect — we will say so on the page rather than let the date carry the whole message.

Disclosed in terms of section 43 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002.

• Full name: Michael Pienaar, trading as MIAX
• Legal status: Sole proprietorship. MIAX is a trading name of Michael Pienaar and is not a separate legal person.
• Registration number: None. MIAX is a sole proprietorship and is not a registered company.
• VAT: Not a registered VAT vendor. No VAT is charged and no tax invoices are issued.
• Physical and postal address: Oxford & Glenhove, 114 Oxford Road, cnr Glenhove Road, Houghton Estate, Johannesburg, 2198, South Africa
• Email: ai@miax.co.za
• Website: miax.co.za
• Information Officer (POPIA): Michael Pienaar, ai@miax.co.za
• Self-regulatory bodies: None. MIAX is not a member of any industry body or accredited scheme, and claims no accreditation it does not hold.
• Governing law: The law of the Republic of South Africa.