Privacy Policy

We respect your right to privacy and therefore aim to ensure that we comply with the legal requirements of the POPI Act which regulates the manner in which we collect, process, store, share and destroy any personal information that you have provided to us. All personal information will be processed in terms of our Privacy Policy, which can be made available upon request.

All enquiries must be addressed to the information officer. Ria Hardenberg can be contacted via email at [email protected] or via telephone at (072) 347 4077.

Who we are

Our website address is: https://www.sharkexplorers.com.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

All data submitted through our contact forms are strictly kept in house and not shared with any third parties.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

WhatsApp enquiries and our AI assistant

When you message us on WhatsApp, your conversation is handled by SHARK EXPLORERS (PTY) LTD using OceanOps, a booking assistant provided by Quolo OÜ (registry code 16530266, Sepapaja tn 6, Tallinn 15551, Estonia).

Outside our office hours, replies may be drafted automatically by an AI assistant. The assistant tells you when it is replying, and a member of our team reviews the conversation the next working day. We remain responsible for how your information is used.

Where your messages go.
To draft replies, the text of your messages is sent to OpenAI, our AI provider, which processes it in the United States. OpenAI does not use your messages to train its models, keeps them for up to 30 days to check for misuse, and then deletes them. This transfer is made under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, with Standard Contractual Clauses as an additional safeguard. A full list of the companies that handle information on our behalf, and where each is located, is published at www.oceanops.co/legal

What we keep, and for how long.
We keep your conversation and any booking details for as long as we are using OceanOps to run our bookings, so that we can handle your trip and answer follow-up questions. If we stop using it, your conversation is deleted within 90 days. You can ask us to delete your conversation sooner; see below.

Technical records.
When something goes wrong in the software, a record of the fault is saved so it can be fixed, and that record can include part of a message. These records are kept for 30 days, or up to 180 days where the fault is still being worked on, and are then deleted.

If you ask us to delete your information.
We will do so and confirm it. A copy may remain in encrypted backups for up to 7 days afterwards before it is overwritten in the normal backup cycle; backups are only ever used to recover from a failure, never to bring back information you have asked us to remove.

If you tell us about a medical condition.
Diving requires us to know about certain medical conditions, and you may mention one while messaging us. We treat that as health information and use it only to assess your fitness to dive safely, on the basis of your explicit consent, given as part of our medical declaration. It is not used for anything else, and our software provider does not use it for any purpose of its own. Decisions about whether you are fit to dive are made by our team, not automatically.

Photos, voice notes and documents.
If you send us media, it is stored privately in Amsterdam in the European Union, and is only viewable by our team through a temporary link that expires after an hour.

Your choices.
You can ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Email [email protected] and we will respond within 30 days. You can also ask us to stop using the AI assistant in your conversation, and a member of our team will reply to you instead.

Analytics

Who we share your data with

We do not sell or rent your personal information. We do share it with the service providers we use to run our website and handle enquiries, to the extent they need it to provide their service. That includes the providers named under “WhatsApp enquiries and our AI assistant” above. We also share information where the law requires us to.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information