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Booki

Privacy policy

This policy covers all the personal information we handle. Photographs of children get their own, more detailed page: how we protect your child’s photos. Where the two differ about a child’s photograph, that page wins.

Who is responsible

Elevated Consulting Solutions (Pty) Ltd, trading as Booki, is the responsible party for the personal information described here, as that term is used in the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA).

What we collect, and why

  • Your name and email address — to create your order, send your book, and answer you if something goes wrong. Once you have paid for a book, we may also occasionally email you about Booki, like a reminder before your child’s next birthday. You can unsubscribe any time, and we never email people who did not order.
  • Your delivery address — only if you order a printed book, and only to deliver it.
  • Your child’s first name and the pronouns you select — to write the story. Every book is written for the same age, so we do not ask you for one. We do not ask for your child’s surname, school or any identifier we do not need.
  • Your child’s birthday, if you choose to give it — optional, and the book is made exactly the same without it. We use it, once you have ordered, to remind you before the next birthday, and for nothing else. We do not share the date with anyone.
  • Photographs of your child — to draw their illustrated character, and nothing else. See the dedicated page.
  • Payment confirmation — the amount, the outcome and a reference from our payment provider. We never receive or store your card number.
  • A delivery address, if you order the printed book — the name of the person receiving it, the street address, town and postal code. We use it to post your book and to answer you if something goes wrong with the parcel. It is not used for marketing and it is not shared with anyone except the courier who has to deliver it.

What we do not collect

We do not run advertising trackers, we do not sell data, and we do not build profiles of you or your child. We do not ask about health, religion, politics or beliefs, and we never name anyone’s race or ethnicity. To keep the drawings consistent we do write down how each character looks in their drawing, skin tone included — see section 4 of our terms.

Who processes it for us

  • an artificial intelligence provider, to write and illustrate;
  • a cloud storage and hosting provider;
  • an email delivery provider;
  • Yoco, our South African payment provider;
  • a printer and a courier, if you order a printed book.

Each is bound in writing to process only on our instructions and to keep the information secure. Printers and couriers receive your delivery details and the book file; they do not receive your child’s original photographs.

Transfers outside South Africa

Some of these providers process data outside South Africa. POPIA permits this where the recipient is subject to an agreement that upholds principles of lawful processing substantially similar to POPIA, including a restriction on further transfer to a third party. We rely on such agreements, and you may ask us about them.

How long we keep it

Per category, because “as long as necessary” is not a period. The day counts below are the same numbers the automatic clean-up runs on — they are read from one place in our code, so this page cannot drift away from what actually happens.

  • Photographs of your child: deleted as soon as the character is approved and the book is delivered, and immediately if you ask us sooner. If you never finish and never come back, they go 14 days after you last touched your book — or 30 days if you got as far as approving the character or starting a payment. We send them to our AI provider with storage switched off, so it does not keep them; it may still log requests for up to 30 days to detect abuse of its own service — explained on the child photos page.
  • Your child’s name, your dedication, your email and the date of birth if you gave one: deleted when you ask us to delete, or on the same 14/30-day clock if you walk away.
  • The written description used to keep the drawings consistent (skin tone, hair, eyes and clothes, as drawn): deleted with everything else, every time, whether or not you paid. It is not part of any record we need to keep.
  • Your child’s approved character: kept with your finished book while your order stands, because it is the picture you approved and our record of what you approved. Ask us and we will delete it too.
  • Your finished book: kept so you can download it again, until you ask us to remove it.
  • Your delivery address: deleted with everything else where no payment was taken. Where a parcel was actually sent, it stays on the order record below — it is the record of where your book went.
  • Order and payment records, and the approval that goes with them: kept for 5 years from the day you paid, because tax law requires it and because it is what lets us answer a query about a charge. The approval — the words you agreed to and a fingerprint of the picture you approved — is kept alongside it, because a card charge can be disputed for up to 540 days and that record is the only thing that shows what you actually approved. Your child’s name is taken out of it either way. This is the one category a deletion request cannot clear, and we will say so rather than quietly keep it. If you never paid us, there is no payment to count from and none of this applies: it is deleted with everything else.
  • The record that we deleted: kept indefinitely, with nothing personal left in it. A row with your child’s details removed is how we can prove the deletion happened.

Security

Information is encrypted in transit and at rest. Your child’s photographs and your finished book are held in private storage with no public address, and are served only through a route that checks the request belongs to your order. Download links are time-limited and unique to an order.

There is no staff dashboard. We have not built any interface that lets a person browse orders or photographs. If you ask us for help with an order, or where we are required to review content for safety, access is by direct query to our systems and is limited to the company’s own officers. We are not able to log an individual file being opened that way, and we would rather say so than imply an audit trail we do not have.

Your rights

You may ask what we hold about you or your child, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to how we use it. We do not charge for this and we do not ask why. Write to info@mybooki.co.za.

You may also complain to the Information Regulator: inforegulator.org.za.

Cookies

We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in to your own order while you are creating it. There are no advertising or analytics cookies that identify you, so there is nothing here for you to consent to or switch off.

We do count page views, so we can tell whether anyone is finding us. That counting is cookieless: it stores nothing on your device, creates no identifier for you, and cannot follow you to another website. We see that a page was viewed, not who viewed it.