Legal

Privacy Policy

This page explains how we handle personal information at The AI Factor. It is a starting baseline. We will expand it as the publication grows and legal review continues.

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, the newsletter, and the services connected to them.

  • Your email address and chosen subscription topic when you sign up, plus an optional first name if you give one (used only to address you in our emails).
  • Consent evidence: when you signed up, where (which form), which version of this policy was active at the time, and a one-way hash of your IP address.
  • Delivery results from our email providers: sends, bounces, complaints, and the like.
  • Technical data needed to keep the site secure, such as request metadata and logs.
  • Anonymous, cookieless usage analytics: which pages are read and where visitors arrive from, with no personal identifiers attached (see Analytics below).

Why we use it

  • To send the newsletter and other communications you asked to receive.
  • To confirm subscriptions and prevent abuse.
  • To honour unsubscribe, suppression, correction, export, and deletion requests.
  • To protect the site, our email reputation, and our systems.
  • To comply with legal obligations, including POPIA.

Service providers

We use a small set of providers to run the site and send email: Cloudflare for hosting, DNS, security, and email routing; Neon for the database; ZeptoMail for transactional email; and Zoho Campaigns for newsletter delivery. They act on our instructions and are not the source of truth for subscription consent.

Analytics

We run our own privacy-preserving analytics, built and hosted entirely by us. There is no Google Analytics, Tag Manager, advertising pixel, heatmap, session replay, or third-party analytics service of any kind, and nothing about what you read leaves our infrastructure.

It uses no cookies and collects no personal information. For each page view we record the page itself, a coarse referrer (the site a visit came from, not the full link), any campaign tag we added to one of our own links, your country, and your browser family. To count visitors without identifying them, we derive a one-way code from your IP address and browser that changes every day and cannot be reversed, linked across days, or tied back to you. We never store your raw IP address or your browsing history, and we never track you from one site to another.

Detailed records are kept for about 90 days and then deleted; only small daily summaries remain after that. Because the data identifies no one and sets no cookies, there is no cookie banner to accept. If this ever changes, this page is updated before it does.

Your choices and rights

You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of 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 we do not accidentally email someone who has asked not to be contacted.

Updates

We will update this page as the service changes. The version active when you subscribed is recorded with your consent evidence.

Last updated: 16 June 2026.