Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

SourceDesk is run by 3VI (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2026/283266/07, which decides how your personal information is used. Our Information Officer is William Horne. Contact: hello@sourcedesk.co.za. We follow the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).

2. What we collect

• ■When you browse: an anonymous record of how SourceDesk is used: the pages you open, what you search for (the words, up to 100 characters, and the beats, themes and organisations they matched), whether a search found nothing, and the entries you copy or add to or remove from your story kit. Each record notes your country and, when you arrive from another website, that website's name (such as google.com), never the page you came from. It never includes your IP address, a cookie, or anything else that identifies you or your device, so we can't tell who you are from it. Please don't type personal information into the search box. SourceDesk has no accounts.
• ■Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes technical information such as your IP address to deliver pages and protect the site. It tells us your country; we don't keep the address.
• ■When you email us at hello@sourcedesk.co.za or releases@sourcedesk.co.za: your name, email address and message.
• ■From press releases: the names, roles and work contact details of spokespeople and press contacts, as the agency supplied them for publication. We keep each release sent to releases@sourcedesk.co.za in full, with the name and address it came from.

3. Why we use it

To run and improve SourceDesk, answer enquiries, publish entries and releases from what agencies send us, and give agencies reports, in totals, on how their clients' entries are used and what journalists look for. Usage records never change what you find or how results are ordered.

4. Our grounds

Our legitimate interest in running a useful resource, in keeping anonymous usage records, and in publishing business contact details from releases; answering you when you write to us; and the agreements we have with agencies.

5. Who sees it

• ■Everyone, for details published in an entry or a release: a spokesperson's name and role, the press contact the agency named, and the text of a release we publish. We never publish the name or address a release was sent from.
• ■Agencies receive totals drawn from the usage records, for example how often their clients' entries were opened or copied, or what journalists searched for on a beat. These totals can't identify you.
• ■Service providers that run parts of SourceDesk for us: Cloudflare (hosting, and receiving our email), Supabase (our database, in Ireland) and Google (Gmail, where our email is delivered). Some store data outside South Africa, so we use only providers bound to protect it to a standard POPIA accepts.
• ■No one buys it. We never sell personal information.

6. Cookies and your browser

SourceDesk sets no cookies, and uses no advertising or outside analytics tools. The usage records in section 2 are our own, kept by SourceDesk, and shared with no analytics company.

If you use the story kit, the entries you collect are kept in your own browser's storage, on your device. The kit itself never reaches SourceDesk; we record only, anonymously, that an entry was added, removed or copied. Empty the kit, or clear this site's data in your browser, to remove it.

7. How long we keep it

Enquiries for 24 months. Usage records in detail for 24 months, then only as monthly totals. Releases and the contact details in them stay in the public archive until the agency or the person concerned asks us to remove them.

8. Your rights

You can ask to see the information we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or object to how we use it. Write to hello@sourcedesk.co.za and we'll respond within 30 days. If you're unhappy with our response, you can complain to the Information Regulator: inforegulator.org.za.

9. Security

We protect your information with reasonable technical and organisational measures. If a breach puts your information at risk, we'll tell you and the Information Regulator as POPIA requires.

10. Under-18s

SourceDesk isn't meant for anyone under 18.

11. Changes

We'll update this policy, and the date above, before SourceDesk starts collecting anything new, such as details for optional accounts.