Privacy and consent

Who is responsible

The Van der Walt family portal is operated for the 2027 tricentenary. The party responsible for your data (the "controller") can be reached at info@tiguri.ch, which is also the address for any privacy request or question.

Where you are in the world

This is a global family, so we hold ourselves to the strictest privacy standard we are subject to, the European GDPR, and apply it to everyone wherever you live. We also respect the South African POPIA, the UK GDPR, the Swiss FADP and the California CCPA. In practice that means the same strong protections for a van der Walt in Pretoria, London, Zurich or California.

What we collect, and why

When you choose to claim your place, and only then, we collect what you give us:

• Your name, to place you and address you properly.
• Your birth year, to estimate your generation.
• A parent's first name, to help find your branch.
• A motto you choose, if you wish.
• Your email, to contact you to confirm your branch.
• Anything you choose to write in your story, and how you say you could help build this, if you offer it. Both are optional. You choose separately whether your story may be used to create a written keepsake.

For security only, our system briefly notes technical signals such as a one-way hashed (not readable) form of your network address, to prevent abuse and spam. We do not build a profile of you.

Approximate location, for the map

To show the family's spread across the world, and to help the committee choose where to gather in 2027, we record an approximate location when you claim, your town or city and country, estimated from your network address by our host Cloudflare. No cookie or device tracking is used for this. On the map it is only ever shown gathered into wider areas, never as you by name, and you can correct it or remove it at any time from your own page or by writing to us.

Email, and how we ask

There are two kinds of email, and we treat them differently. Transactional email, your branch confirmation and your one-tap sign-in link, is part of the service you asked for. The weekly chapter of Of the Forest and news of the gathering are marketing, and we send those only if you specifically opt in with a separate, unticked box, never bundled with anything else. When you opt in we email you once to confirm it was really you, and you are added only when you click that link. Every marketing email carries a one-click unsubscribe, and you can also unsubscribe from your member page at any time. We keep a dated record of when and how you consented, and we never sell or share your address.

Cookies and tracking

We use two strictly necessary cookies: one to keep you signed in to your own page, and one to remember whether you are reading in Afrikaans or English. Neither carries any tracking, and the law does not require your consent for cookies that are essential to a service you asked for. We set no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies of any kind, so we show a brief notice rather than a consent wall. If we ever added anything that tracked usage, we would ask your consent first through a clear banner, and you would be free to say no.

On what basis we hold it

We hold your details because you gave clear, specific consent, which we record together with the exact wording you agreed to and when. You can withdraw that consent at any time, as easily as you gave it, by emailing us, and we will remove your details.

Who can see it, and who helps us

• We do not sell your data. We do not use it for advertising. We do not share it outside the family work.
• We use Cloudflare to host the site and store the data; they act only on our instructions as our processor, under their data protection terms.
• We use Resend to send you transactional email only, the confirmation when you claim a place and your one-tap sign-in link. We send from a European (Ireland) region. Resend receives only your name and email address, for that single purpose, on our instructions and under its data protection terms, with standard contractual safeguards for any transfer outside your region. We do not use it for marketing, and replies reach our own mailbox at hello@vdw300.com.
• Your data is stored in the European Union.
• Once your branch is checked and confirmed, your name and where you sit on the line appear on the public One Tree, which is the point of claiming a place. Your email, your story and your security details never appear there. Until you are confirmed, everything you submit stays private.

How long we keep it

A placement we cannot confirm is treated as provisional and is removed in time if it is never linked. Confirmed details are kept while you remain part of the family record, and removed whenever you ask.

Children

We do not knowingly collect details directly from children. If you add a young family member, please do so only with the right to act for them, and contact us if you would like a child's details removed.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its use, or receive a copy, at any time, by writing to info@tiguri.ch. We will act on it. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority if you are unhappy with how we handle your data.

Changes

If we change this notice we will update the version and date above, and where the change is significant we will tell the people it affects.