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.
Cookies and tracking
We use one strictly necessary cookie, and only when you sign in to your own page, to keep you signed in. It carries no tracking, and the law does not require your consent for a cookie that is essential to a service you asked for. We set no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies of any kind, which is why there is no cookie banner. 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 Brevo, an EU-based email provider, to send you the confirmation email when you claim a place. They receive only your name and email address, for that single purpose, on our instructions and under their data protection terms, and they hold it in the European Union.
- 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.