Privacy policy

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA), Hunt Local is the responsible party for the personal information described here.

Trading as

Hunt Local

Email

liamcshughes@gmail.com

Country of operation

South Africa

Information Officer

Liam Hughes

Still to be confirmed: registered name, registration number, VAT number, physical address, phone. Hunt Local is not yet trading and no real bookings or payments are being taken. These details will be published here before it does.

We collect what a booking actually needs, what you choose to tell us about your own hunting, and what gets searched for on the site. There is no advertising network, and we do not sell or share your information with data brokers.

When you create an account

Your first name and surname, your email address, and your South African mobile number. The number is required, not optional: a farm is told to expect you on their property, and it is how they reach you about your hunt. Your password is never stored - we keep only a scrypt hash of it, which cannot be reversed back into your password.

We text you a code to confirm the number is yours. The code is stored hashed, the same way your password is, and it stops working once you have used it or after ten minutes. We keep a record of the codes sent to you so we can spot a number being targeted; we never send you marketing by SMS, and we will never phone and ask you to read a code out.

We also ask for your South African ID number, to confirm you're a South African citizen or resident, since that's who Hunt Local is built for. We only check its format and checksum, not a real Home Affairs lookup, and we don't share it with farms or anyone else.

About your hunting

When you sign up we ask how much hunting you have done, and you can tell us which calibres you shoot, what kind of hunting you prefer and which provinces you would like to hunt in. Only the first is required. You can change or clear any of it on your account page at any time.

We ask because a farm otherwise finds out who is arriving on the morning of the hunt. Knowing in advance whether you want a guide beside you or a map and a vehicle is the difference between a hunt that suits you and one that does not.

Your calibres are treated as sensitive, because a list of them says something about what is in your home. They are never published, never shown to other hunters, and never appear on a farm's public listing. A farm sees them only once you have booked with that farm, along with your experience level and the kind of hunting you prefer. Which provinces you would like to hunt in is never shared with any farm - we use it only to show you farms worth your drive.

What gets searched for

When a search runs we record what was asked for - province, species, dates, party size - and how many farms came back. If you are logged in, that record is linked to your account; if you are not, it is not linked to anyone.

The reason is narrow: a search that returns nothing is the only way we can see what people want that we cannot currently offer, which is what tells us where to find more farms. We do not use it to build an advertising profile.

When you book a hunt

The farm and experience you booked, your dates, how many hunters, non-hunters and children are in your party, the species you said you were interested in, and what you paid. Your name and email are copied onto the booking at the time you make it, so a later change to your profile does not rewrite a farm's record of who is arriving.

When you save a farm

Just the farm. Before you have an account this stays in your own browser; once you log in it moves onto your account so it follows you between devices.

When you list a farm

Your contact details as the applicant, and everything you enter about the property: its location, capacity, rates, seasons, facilities and the experiences you offer. Once a listing is approved, its public details are visible to anyone browsing the site. Your own contact details are not published on the listing.

Server logs

Our hosting provider keeps standard request logs, which include IP addresses, for security and troubleshooting. We do not use them to build a profile of you.

We do not sell your personal information, ever. It is shared in exactly three situations:

• The farm you book. When you book, the farm sees your name, email, phone number, dates and party size. They need it to expect you and to reach you on the day. This is the whole point of the booking, so it is not optional. They also see how much hunting you have done, which calibres you shoot and what kind of hunting you prefer, so they can arrange the right hunt for you - see “About your hunting” above. They do not see your ID number, your password, or which provinces you would like to hunt in.
• Service providers who run the platform on our behalf - Vercel (hosting, and page-view analytics if you allow it), Supabase (our database), Resend (the emails we send you) and Paystack (card payments). They process your information under our instructions and for no other purpose.
• Where the law requires it - a court order, a regulator, or a legal obligation such as the financial-services rules that will apply once we handle payments.

Vercel, Supabase and Resend operate data centres outside South Africa. POPIA section 72 permits this where the receiving country has comparable protection or the provider is bound by contract to uphold it, and our agreements with these providers are on that basis.

The specific regions will be named here before the site goes live.

Booking records are kept for as long as we are required to hold financial records, which under South African tax law is five years. Account details are kept while your account is open. If you close your account, we delete what we are not legally required to retain.

You are entitled to:

• Ask what personal information we hold about you, and get a copy of it
• Have information that is wrong or incomplete corrected
• Ask us to delete information we no longer have a reason to keep. We may have to keep booking records for the retention period above
• Object to how we are using your information
• Complain to the Information Regulator if you think we have handled it badly. You can do that without going through us first

To exercise any of these, email liamcshughes@gmail.com. We will respond within a reasonable period, and we will not charge you for a first request.

The Information Regulator can be reached at inforeg@justice.gov.za, or through its own website.

The checkbox on the signup form is unticked, and it stays unticked unless you tick it. Under POPIA section 69 consent to electronic marketing is something you give, not something you fail to refuse, and a pre-ticked box is not consent.

If you have booked with us, we may also email you about similar hunts - section 69 allows that for existing customers - and every one of those emails carries the same unsubscribe link as any other.

You can turn marketing email off in two places: the Email section of your account, or the unsubscribe link at the foot of any marketing email we send. The unsubscribe link needs no login and takes effect immediately.

Turning it off never affects the emails that matter. Booking confirmations, payment receipts and anything to do with a hunt you have booked are not marketing and are sent either way.

Passwords are hashed with scrypt and never stored in a readable form. Your session cookie is signed, so it cannot be tampered with, and marked HttpOnly so scripts cannot read it. Access to a farm's bookings and earnings is restricted to the people who run that farm, and administrators.

No system is perfectly secure. If we ever discover a breach affecting your information, we are required to tell both you and the Information Regulator, and we will.

Hunt Local sets one cookie to keep you logged in, and a second only if you use the language switch, to remember whether you chose Afrikaans or English. There is no advertising tracking on this site. We count page views with Vercel Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and loads only if you allow it. See the full cookie list →

If we change how we handle your information in a way that affects you, we will update the date at the top of this page and, for anything significant, tell you directly.