Privacy Policy

Account details you provide (email address, a securely hashed password, display name, optional profile image, and country). Piece content you enter (display name, description, website, links, and image). Purchase details, where an order is placed — your email and the transaction record; payment card details are entered with and handled by our payment provider and are not received or stored by us. If you connect a social account or a design tool, the limited data described below. And basic, privacy-respecting analytics about how the site is used.

To create and operate your account; to display your piece and public link page; to process purchases and provide receipts and support; to review content for safety and legal compliance; to show your connected social accounts and follower counts if you enable that; to let you use one of your own designs from a connected design tool as your piece image; to send service messages and, if you have not opted out, a weekly summary about your pieces; and to secure, operate, and improve the service. We rely on the lawful bases in POPIA, including performance of our contract with you, your consent (which you can withdraw), our legitimate interests in running and securing the service, and compliance with the law.

If you choose to connect a social account (such as YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok), we ask that platform, through its official login, only for permission to read your basic public profile and your follower or subscriber count. We use this to show your account and its follower count on your piece. We store the connection details and an encrypted access token needed to refresh that count, and nothing else from the platform — we do not read your posts, messages, or private data, and we do not post on your behalf.

When you connect YouTube, our use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. We request read-only access to your YouTube channel’s public profile and subscriber count, use it solely to display that count on your piece, do not sell it, and do not share it with third parties except as needed to provide this feature. You can revoke our access at any time by disconnecting the account in your settings or from your Google Account’s security page.

If you choose to connect Canva, we ask Canva, through its official login, only for read-only permission to see your Canva display name, to list your designs, and to export the one you select. We use this so that you can pick one of your own designs as your piece image instead of exporting and uploading a file by hand. We store the connection details and an encrypted access token, and nothing else from Canva — we do not store your designs, their titles, or their thumbnails, which are read while you are choosing and then discarded. The design you select is exported once as an image, which becomes the image on your own piece and is then treated exactly like an image you uploaded yourself. We never create, edit, or delete anything in your Canva account, and we hold no permission that would let us. You can disconnect at any time from Settings → Design integrations, which revokes our access with Canva and deletes the stored connection and token immediately.

Your display name, description, website, country, image, and any connected social accounts and follower counts you choose to show appear publicly on your piece and the wall. Your email is never shown publicly. If you own a piece, you can see aggregate statistics about visits to your link page — how many views and link clicks it had, and a breakdown by country, device type, and referring site. These are counts only: visitors are never identified, we do not store their IP addresses, and the same visitor cannot be followed between pieces or across days. That is true of the statistics we produce. A piece owner on a paid plan can additionally run their own Meta or Google tracking on their link page, which is separate and described under “Tracking on a piece owner’s link page” below.

A piece owner can add an email signup field to their link page. If you enter your address there, we send you one email asking you to confirm, and nothing else happens unless you click the link in it — an address that is never confirmed is deleted after 30 days. Once confirmed, we pass your address to whichever email tool that owner has connected (for example Mailchimp, Klaviyo or Kit), together with the handle you signed up from and the time you confirmed. We record the IP address you confirmed from as evidence of your consent; it is never shown to the owner or included in their export, and we erase it after twelve months. For these lists the owner is the responsible party and we act on their behalf: we send only that confirmation, and any newsletter you receive afterwards comes from them and carries their own unsubscribe link. You can opt out of our record at any time using the unsubscribe link in the confirmation email.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with operators (processors) who help us run the service under contract and on our instructions — our hosting and database providers, our payment provider (PayFast), our email provider, image-safety screening services, and, if you have accepted it, Google Analytics — and where we are required to by law or to protect our rights or users. These operators may only use the information to provide their service to us.

Some of our operators process information outside South Africa (for example in the European Union or the United States). Where information is transferred across borders, we take the steps POPIA requires to ensure it receives an adequate level of protection, such as contractual safeguards with the recipient. Where you have agreed to Google Analytics, or to a piece owner’s tracking on their link page, those transfers to Google and Meta in the United States happen on the basis of your consent, which you can withhold or withdraw.

We keep account and piece information for as long as your account or piece is active, and thereafter as needed to meet legal, accounting, or dispute-resolution obligations. Connected social account and design tool tokens are deleted when you disconnect that account. Analytics events are retained only for a limited period and then deleted. Unconfirmed mailing-list signups are deleted after 30 days, and the IP address recorded as proof of a mailing-list consent is erased after twelve months. If you unsubscribe from a list we keep a record that you did, so that the same address is not added again by mistake.

We use reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information. Passwords are stored only as secure hashes, connected-account access tokens are encrypted at rest, and access to personal information is limited to what is needed to run the service. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to keep your information safe and to address any incident appropriately.

Under POPIA you have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to certain processing, and to withdraw consent where we rely on it. You can disconnect any social account or design tool at any time from Settings → Social integrations or Settings → Design integrations, which deletes the stored connection and token, and you can request changes to or removal of your piece. To exercise any of these rights, email hello@myinternetpiece.com and we will respond within a reasonable time.

Without asking you, we set only the cookies needed to make the site work: a session cookie that keeps you signed in, and short-lived security cookies that protect the login and connection flows from being forged. Our own visit statistics need no cookie at all — they work from a salted one-way code that changes every day and is different for every piece, so they count visits without identifying anyone and without storing an address.

Beyond that we use Google Analytics to understand which pages people find useful. It sets its own cookies and sends your visit to Google in the United States, it is not needed to run the site, and so we do not load it unless you agree — we ask on your first visit, and nothing of Google’s loads until you accept. Declining costs you nothing: signing in, buying and every other feature work exactly the same. We run no advertising cookies of our own. Your answer is remembered in a cookie for six months, and you can change it at any time with “Cookie settings” in the footer of any page — declining there also switches off the tag already running and deletes the cookies it set.

Google Analytics does not run on a piece owner’s public link page. That page is the owner’s, it asks its own separate question about the owner’s own tracking, and answering one is never taken as answering the other.

A piece owner on a paid plan can add their own Meta (Facebook) pixel and Google Analytics property to their public link page, to measure their own visits and advertising. This is the owner’s tracking in the owner’s accounts, not ours — we never see what it collects, and the owner is the responsible party for it. Because it sends your information to those companies for their own purposes, we do not load it unless you agree: the page asks you first, and until you accept, no Meta or Google script loads and nothing is sent. If you accept, the owner’s pixel runs in your browser and we also send Meta a copy of that single page view from our server — including your IP address, browser user agent, and a coded form of your country — so that a view is not double-counted or lost to a content blocker. If you decline, none of that happens. Your answer is remembered in a cookie for six months, and you can change it with “Cookie settings” at the foot of that link page, which reloads it with the tracking off and the pixel’s own cookies removed.

The service is not intended for children under 18, and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will change the effective date above and, where the change is material, take reasonable steps to notify you.

If you have a concern we have not resolved, you may lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa) at inforegulator.org.za. We would appreciate the chance to address it first — please contact us at hello@myinternetpiece.com.