Privacy

We publish your name, the work you do, the area you work in, the languages you speak, a photo if you gave us one, and a phone number so customers can reach you. You told us we could — we record when and how you agreed, and we do not publish anyone without that.

We publish it for one purpose: so that people looking to hire someone can find and contact you. We do not sell your details, we do not share the list with marketers, and we do not pass it to recruitment agencies or labour brokers.

You can change or remove your listing whenever you want, for any reason, without explaining why. It takes one message and there is no cost.

We publish your first name and your suburb — never your surname, address, phone number or email. We keep a contact detail privately so we can check the reference is real, and we use it for nothing else.

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies and without building a profile of you. There is no advertising network on this site, no tracking pixels, and no third-party scripts following you elsewhere.

That is also why you have not been asked to accept cookies — there is nothing to accept.

Public hotel and home-listing source data is collected using Firecrawl. Source URLs and limited factual fields are stored with collection and expiry dates. These are unverified source claims, not verified advertisements. We do not import personal contacts, exact home addresses, photographs or review text into this feed. Private shortlist notes are never sent to Firecrawl. Contact us to request removal of a source record.

Saved hotels and home-buying notes are stored in this browser's local storage, not in an account or public listing. Clearing browser data removes them. Anyone using this browser profile can see them. Exported home shortlists contain your notes and listing links; treat those files as private. We do not fetch the listing links you enter, publish your notes or send them to agents.

Discovery assistant questions are sent to Cloudflare Workers AI. Saved homes and notes are not attached. We do not store these questions in our database. Map tiles are requested from OpenFreeMap, which receives normal network request information such as your IP address. External listing, source and booking links open third-party sites; we do not receive reservation or payment details.

We do not ask for ID numbers, bank details or addresses, and you should never give them to us. Nobody from houtbay.app will ever phone you to ask for a bank account, an OTP or a payment to stay listed. If someone does, it is not us.

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act you can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, and object to us using it. We will do any of those without argument and without charge.

You can also complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa if you think we have handled your information badly. We would rather you told us first so we can fix it.

Your listing stays up while you want it up. If you ask us to remove it, we take it off the site immediately and delete the underlying record within thirty days. Sign-up submissions that never became listings are deleted after six months.