Privacy policy

This policy explains what personal information Sonowe Fly collects, why, who sees it and how to remove it, under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).

What we collect

• Account: your email address and a scrambled form of your password.
• Profile (you choose what to fill in): name, photo, whether you're a pilot or owner, home airfield, region, self-declared hours and ratings, a short bio and a WhatsApp number.
• What you post: forum posts, Hire & fly listings, events and RSVPs, aircraft details and reports.
• Private messages: messages you send to and receive from other members.
• Clubs and schools: membership details, and documents a community manager uploads for verification (such as an Approved Training Organisation certificate or a letter of authority).
• Technical: server logs and the cookies needed to keep you logged in and protect forms.
• Analytics: Google Analytics counts visits and shows us which pages people use, using cookies. Google processes this outside South Africa. We send it page views and actions such as "joined a club", never your name, email or what you wrote. No advertising cookies. You can block it with your browser's settings or Google's opt-out add-on.

Why

To run the community: your account, your profile, your clubs, and the emails you need (sign-up codes, approvals, and notifications you turned on). Waitlist emails are used once, to tell you if aircraft hire opens.

Who sees it

• Logged-in members see profiles. Your WhatsApp number is hidden unless you choose to show it, publicly or to members of your clubs.
• Club and school pages, their public posts and public events are visible to anyone.
• Verification documents are private: only Sonowe staff and that organisation's community managers can open them.
• Private messages are seen only by the two people in the conversation. Sonowe staff read a message only when one of them reports it.
• The public forum, Hire & fly listings, and anything a club makes public can be read by anyone, including people without an account, search engines and AI services, which may use public pages in their answers and to train their models. Private messages, members-only club content and your profile are never shared this way. People without an account see your first name and initial; members see your full name.
• We don't sell personal information.

Where it's kept

Sonowe Fly's servers are in South Africa. Emails are sent through Resend, which processes email addresses and message content outside South Africa; Cloudflare carries traffic to the site. Both protect information under their own agreements.

Your rights

• See and correct: edit your profile in Settings.
• Copy: download your data from Settings.
• Delete: delete your account in Settings. Your profile and personal details are removed; things you posted stay, shown as "Deleted user".
• Complain: email us first; you can also contact the Information Regulator (inforegulator.org.za).

Contact

[email protected]