PRIVACY POLICY

​​OVERVIEW

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GIFA 's privacy policy sets out to respect and protect the privacy of members of GIFA and visitors to it's website. This policy statement tells you how we collect information from you and how we use it.

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WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT / DISCLOSE ABOUT YOU AND WHY?

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The Personal Information we may collect and why and how we use it depends on our relationship with you. For example, if you only use our website contact form we only retrain the data necessary to notify and verify the enquiry took place.

Personal Information can extend to any information where you can be identified directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier (for example, a name or email address, or an online identifier such as a unique device identification number).

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POPI requires that Personal information “is collected for a specific, explicitly defined and lawful purpose related to a function or activity of the responsible party.”

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Be assured that GIFA will not disclose your personal information to third parties without your consent, except in aggregated form, as explained below. However, GIFA reserves the right to disclose member information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) GIFA 's rights or property, other members, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities. GIFA also reserves the right to disclose member information when we believe in good faith that the law requires it.

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GIFA collects and shares aggregate information about our members with business partners, sponsors and other third parties. For example, we will say GIFA 's audience is X percent females and Y percent males. This data is used to customise GIFA 's content and marketing to deliver a better experience for our members and will in no way personally identify you.

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There are cases where we may ask you for personal information such as your name, email address, and telephone number. For example, we request personal information when you complete a contact form, register as a GIFA member, for monetary transactions, or for services that require cpd points events, registration to an event, etc. GIFA needs to collect this information for fulfilling its services, tracking/verifying compliance with GIFA policies and applicable law and/or for purposes of institute decisions. In addition, we may request your credit card information to bill you for membership fees or other services or products offered for sale through GIFA or certain third party vendors. We may provide this credit card information to such third party vendors if necessary to complete your requested transaction.

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Furthermore, we may use your personal information to send you periodic communications, solicit your feedback, provide you with special offers, or for other purposes and to customise the services we provide to you. At the bottom of every communication, GIFA provides a link that can be used to opt out of receiving any communications from us.

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USE OF IP ADDRESS

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An IP address is a number that's automatically assigned to your computer whenever you're surfing the Web. Web servers -- the big computers that "serve up" Web pages -- automatically identify your computer by its IP address.

GIFA collects IP addresses for the purposes of system administration, to report aggregate information for analytics and form enquiries. When guests request pages from GIFA, our servers log the guests' IP addresses. It is not our practice to link IP addresses to anything personally identifiable, which means that a member's session will be logged, but the member remains anonymous to us. However, we reserve the right to use IP addresses to identify a member only when we feel it is necessary to enforce compliance with our house rules or terms of use agreement or to protect our service, site, customers or others. 

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USE OF COOKIES

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What are cookies? Cookies are pieces of information that a website transfers to an individual's hard drive for record-keeping purposes. Cookies make Web-surfing easier for you by saving your preferences while you're at our site. We never save passwords or credit card information in cookies. The use of cookies is an industry standard -- you'll find them at most major websites.

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By showing how and when guests use a site, cookies help us see which areas are popular and which are not. Many improvements and updates to the site are based on such data as total number of visitors and pages viewed. This information is most easily tracked with cookies. We use the information from cookies to provide services better tailored to our members' needs.

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Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies. You can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, note that many parts of the GIFA service will not function properly or may be considerably slower if you refuse cookies. For example, without cookies, you will not be able to set personalized news preferences or you may have difficulty completing some transactions, one critical transaction is logging into and out of a website as a user.

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We currently do not use cookies for advertising via services like Google Adwords.

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LINKS TO OTHER SITES / PUBLIC AREAS

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Members should be aware that when you are on GIFA, you could be directed to other sites that are beyond our control. There are links to other sites from GIFA pages that take you outside our service. These other sites may send their own cookies to members, collect data or solicit personal information. The privacy policies of these other sites may significantly differ from that of GIFA. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these other sites and cannot guarantee the security of any of your personal information collected there.

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Please keep in mind that whenever you give out personal information on a "public" venue online --- for example, via message boards or chat --- that information can be collected and used by people you don't know. We currently do not use embedded 3rd party services to facilitate features on our website that will collect your personal data. For full disclosure we use Google Maps services within the website to display our own address and MailChimp as our emailing software.

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MINORS

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GIFA does not collect information from minors. If you are under 18, please do not provide any personal information to us.

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HOW DO WE HOLD PERSONAL INFORMATION

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​We may hold your Personal Information in electronic or in hard copy form. We may keep this information at our own premises, or at sites managed by our services providers. We are committed to keeping your Personal Information safe, confidential and secure. We use a range of physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to do this. We update these safeguards from time to time in order to address new and emerging security threats. We also train Our People on privacy matters as appropriate, and seek to limit access to Personal Information to those of our People who need to know that information.

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RETENTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

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We retain Personal Information we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so (for example, to provide you with a product or service you have requested, or to comply with applicable legal, tax or accounting requirements). GIFA shall only retain and store your Personal Information for the period for which the information is required to serve the primary purpose for its collection, or a legitimate interest or the period required to comply with applicable legal requirements, whichever is longer. We apply our standard document retention and disposal procedures and processes to records that include Personal Information. These procedures and processes take account of document retention requirements imposed by law in the jurisdictions where we operate. For more information on our document retention practices please contact us using the details below contained in this Policy.

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SECURITY & DATA PROTECTION

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Protecting the security of all personally identifiable information associated with our members and website visitors is of utmost concern to us. We take reasonable precautions to ensure the security of your information on our systems, for example, website code is updated as soon as security updates are provided and we deliver content over a SHA-256-bit SSL encrypted connection supplied by Google and Let's Encrypt. Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while GIFA strives to protect its members' personal information and privacy, we cannot guarantee or warrant the security of any information you disclose or transmit to us online and cannot be responsible for the theft, destruction, or inadvertent disclosure of your personal information.

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Your GIFA login, if you have one, is password protected so that only you can access it and view the member information relevant to the account. In registering for the GIFA services, you agreed not to divulge your password to anyone. Ultimately, you are responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your passwords and any account information.

Remember to sign out of your GIFA account and close your browser window when you have finished your work. This will ensure that others cannot access your personal information and correspondence if your computer is accessible to others or if you share a computer with someone else or are using a computer in a public place like a library or Internet café.

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WHAT RIGHTS DO I HAVE AND HOW CAN I EXERCISE THEM?

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You have the right to: 

• ask what Personal Information we hold about you; 

• request access to the Personal Information that we hold about you; 

• ask us to update, correct or delete any out-of-date or incorrect Personal Information we hold about you; 

• object to the processing of your Personal Information. 

If you wish to exercise any of these rights or you have any queries regarding the Personal Information that we hold about you, you can contact us at the details provided below. 

To protect the integrity and security of the information we hold, we may ask that you follow a defined access procedure, which may include steps to verify your identity. 

If you want us to delete all Personal Information we have about you, we may need to terminate the agreements we have with you. We can refuse to delete your information if we are required by law to retain it or if we need it to protect our rights.

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WHO CAN I CONTACT IF I HAVE A QUESTION OF COMPLAINT

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If you have a question, concern or complaint regarding the way in which we handle your Personal Information, or if you believe that that GIFA has failed to comply with this Policy or breached any applicable laws in relation to the management of that information, you can make a complaint.

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Email: membership@gifa.org.za

Standard Mail: 

The Gauteng Institute for Architecture

Post Office box: 2094

Houghton

Sandton

2041

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YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THESE TERMS

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By using this site, you signify your assent to the GIFA Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to this policy, please do not use this site.

The terms of this Privacy Policy may change from time to time without prior notice to you, so please check this page periodically for any changes. Your continued use of this site following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.

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