Standpoint Family

Privacy Notice

Version 1.2, 18 September 2026 (adds children's details and the handover check-in location). Version 1.1, 17 September 2026, added records as evidence, certificates, court orders and the fee waiver.

1. Who we are

Standpoint Family is provided by TownConnect (Pty) Ltd, registration 2026/106250/07, 442 Davidson Street, Vaalwater, Limpopo, 0530. Our Information Officer is Stephen Earle. This notice is written to meet the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA).

2. What we hold

About you: your email address, your name, your role on the case, sign-in records, consent records, and payment records. We do not receive your full card details; PayFast does.

What you and the other people on the case put in:

• Your children's names, dates of birth, schools and medical aid references.
• Your children's school contacts, doctor, allergies, medication, emergency contacts, and passport and identity numbers. The numbers are shown with their last four characters only, and showing one in full is recorded in the history.
• If you switch it on, where your phone is when you tap "I am here" at a handover: one point per tap, with its accuracy. It is never tracking, and it is never recorded in survivor mode.
• Homes, incomes, budgets, assets and debts.
• Child expenses, maintenance payments, receipts and bank statements.
• Contact and handover records, calendars and reminders.
• Court orders, parenting plans, settlement agreements and other documents, including photographs.
• Messages between the parents, and private notes and incident notes.
• Questions you ask the Record, and its answers.

3. Children's information and special personal information

Information about children is given special protection by POPIA (sections 34 and 35). Health information, and information about alleged criminal behaviour that may appear in incident notes, is special personal information (section 26). We process it only to keep the record for you, and only with the consent you give at sign-up as the child's parent.

Children's information. We process information about your children because you, as their parent or guardian, consent to it when you sign up, and because it is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of a right or obligation in law, namely your rights and duties in respect of your children. These are the grounds in section 35(1)(a) and (b) of POPIA.

The other parent's information. If the other parent has not joined the case, we hold information about them that you enter, such as their name, contact details, payments and contact events. We process it because it is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of your rights and duties in law towards your children, and because it serves your legitimate interests in keeping an accurate record, which is a ground under section 11(1)(f) of POPIA. We limit it to what the record needs. The other parent may contact us about it under section 11.

4. Why we use it

• To keep your case record and show it to the people you allow.
• To read documents you upload, remind you of dates, and answer questions about your record.
• To take payment, keep the service secure, and meet our legal obligations.

We do not sell personal information, use it for advertising, or share one case's information with any other case.

5. Who can see what

• Shared items are visible to everyone on the case.
• Only me items, private notes and incident notes are visible only to the person who created them. The other parent and the attorney cannot see them. This is enforced on our servers, not only in the app.
• An attorney invited to a case sees shared items only, and cannot change anything.
• Our staff do not read case records, except where you ask us to help or the law requires it.

6. Where the information is stored

Standpoint Family's data is stored outside South Africa, in the United Kingdom and Western Europe. We cannot presently offer South African data residency.

Some of our service providers process information outside South Africa. Our database is hosted in London, our files in Western Europe, and our server code runs in the United States. We rely on section 72(1)(a) of POPIA: each provider is bound by a written contract that requires it to protect your information to a standard substantially similar to POPIA, including limits on onward transfer. We also rely on section 72(1)(b), because the transfer is necessary to provide the service you asked for. We do not claim that your information is stored in South Africa.

7. AI providers

Only what is needed for a task is sent: a document to be read, or the relevant entries from your record to answer a question. It is processed to return a result and is not used to train public models under our agreements with these providers. Instructions written inside documents or messages are treated as data, never as commands.

8. How long we keep it

• For as long as the case exists, subject to the retention setting the case owner chooses.
• When a case is deleted it can be restored for 14 days. After that it is permanently removed, including its documents.
• Audit and payment records are kept for as long as the law requires.

9. Security

• Sign-in uses a one-time code sent to your email. Codes expire after 10 minutes and lock after 5 wrong attempts. Only a keyed hash of each code is stored.
• Sessions are held in a secure cookie and can be revoked from any device.
• Each case is isolated from every other case on our servers, and private items are filtered on our servers.
• Documents are stored privately and opened only through short-lived signed links.
• Every change to the record is written to an audit trail with who made it, when, and the value before and after.
• Entries in the record are append only: a correction is a new version and the earlier one is kept. Each entry is linked into a chain of fingerprints (SHA-256), which the system checks every night, so a change made outside the app would be detected.

If a compromise creates a risk to your information, we will notify you and the Information Regulator as section 22 of POPIA requires.

10. Disclosure required by law, and certificates

We disclose personal information only as this notice describes, or where the law requires it, for example under a lawful subpoena or court order. Our lawful basis for such a disclosure is that it complies with an obligation imposed by law (section 11(1)(c) of POPIA) and, where applicable, that it is necessary for the conduct of proceedings in a court or tribunal (section 15(3)(c)).

Unless the law or the order prohibits it, we tell the account holder before we produce records. We may charge the person or body asking for them a reasonable fee for the work.

A certificate of record is issued only when a person on the case asks for one. It contains an opaque case reference, counts of entries and their fingerprints, not the content of the record. The signed copy is sent only to the person who asked. A certificate describes the system, not the truth of what a person typed.

Protection order fee waiver. If you ask for a waiver, we keep the order's case number and court and your copy of the order to decide the waiver. Only our operators see them. They are never shown to anyone else on the case.

11. Your rights

You may ask to see, correct or delete your personal information, or object to its processing. You can export or delete your case yourself in the app.

If you are the other parent and you have not joined the case, you may write to the Information Officer at the address in section 13 to ask what information about you we hold, to ask for it to be corrected, or to object to its processing. We will need to confirm who you are before we answer. We will give you the information about you that is held in the shared record. We will not give you the case owner's private notes, private documents or private questions, or anything that would reveal an address or location the case owner has hidden. Because the record cannot be edited, a correction you ask for is added as a correction entry alongside the original. We respond within 30 days, as POPIA requires.

You may complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa (inforegulator.org.za).

12. Cookies

We use one cookie to keep you signed in. We use no advertising or tracking cookies.

13. Contact

Information Officer: Stephen Earle, TownConnect (Pty) Ltd, 442 Davidson Street, Vaalwater, Limpopo, 0530. Email: info@intelligencefoundry.co.za or hello@townconnect.co.za.