Who we are

The AI Factor is a South African platform that publishes a newsletter and convenes public conversation about AI. For privacy questions, write to privacy@aifactor.co.za.

What we collect

We collect only what we need to run the site, newsletter, and connected services.

• Your email address and chosen subscription topic, plus an optional first name used only to greet you.
• Consent evidence: when and where you signed up, the policy version, and a one-way hash of your IP address.
• Delivery results from our email providers, including sends, bounces, and complaints.
• Technical data needed to keep the site secure, such as request metadata and logs.
• Anonymous, cookieless usage analytics with no personal identifiers attached.

Why we use it

• To send communications readers requested.
• To confirm subscriptions and prevent abuse.
• To honour unsubscribe, suppression, correction, export, and deletion requests.
• To protect the site, email reputation, and systems.
• To comply with legal obligations, including POPIA.

Service providers

We use trusted providers to run the platform:

• Cloudflare for hosting, DNS, security, and email routing.
• Neon for the database.
• ZeptoMail for transactional email.
• Zoho Campaigns for newsletter delivery.

They process data on our instructions and are not the source of truth for consent.

Analytics

We run our own privacy-preserving analytics. There is no Google Analytics, advertising pixel, heatmap, session replay, or third-party analytics service. It uses no cookies, never stores your raw IP address, and never tracks you from one site to another.

Detailed records are kept for about 90 days and then deleted; only small daily summaries remain. If this changes, this page will be updated before it does.

Your choices and rights

You can unsubscribe using the link in any newsletter. You can also ask us to correct, export, or delete your personal information by writing to privacy@aifactor.co.za. We retain a small amount of hashed suppression data so someone who opted out is not contacted again.