Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible for your personal information?

For personal information collected through this website and through CoreUtilities enquiries, Craig Berman trading as CoreUtilities acts as the responsible party for purposes of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA).

2. What personal information do we collect?

When you submit an enquiry through our website, you may provide:

• your name;
• company or property name;
• email address;
• phone number;
• property location;
• the solution or service you are interested in;
• property type;
• approximate monthly utility spend; and
• any information you choose to include in your message.

We may also process technical information needed to operate and protect the website. For example, when the enquiry form is submitted, a hashed form of the submitting IP address is used for rate limiting and abuse prevention.

If you later communicate with us by email, phone or another agreed channel, we may also retain information you provide during those communications where it is relevant to your enquiry.

3. Why do we use your information?

We use personal information for purposes connected with your enquiry, including to:

• receive, identify and respond to your enquiry;
• contact you using the details you provide;
• understand your property, utility requirements and areas of interest;
• explain solutions and potential next steps relevant to the enquiry you made;
• decide what further information may be needed to assess your requirements;
• maintain appropriate records of enquiries and communications;
• protect the website and enquiry form against spam, abuse and excessive submissions; and
• comply with applicable legal obligations or protect legitimate legal rights where necessary.

The initial purpose of the enquiry form is lead contact and qualification: to respond to you, understand what you are looking for and explain the relevant offering. Submitting the form does not by itself give specialist project partners permission to contact you directly.

We will not use an enquiry as permission to add you to unrelated marketing campaigns. If we wish to use your contact details for direct marketing that requires separate consent, we will ask for that consent separately.

4. Is providing your information voluntary?

Submitting an enquiry is voluntary. However, the website form requires your name, email address, phone number and solution of interest so that we can meaningfully receive and respond to the enquiry.

Other form fields are optional. If the required information is not provided, the website may not be able to submit the enquiry and we may not be able to contact you about it.

5. Who do we share personal information with?

Initial enquiry stage

We do not hand your contact information to specialist project partners, installers, finance providers, suppliers or similar third parties simply because you submitted the website enquiry form. The initial enquiry is handled by CoreUtilities.

If your enquiry progresses

CoreUtilities works with specialist project partners who may become involved if your enquiry progresses. Before a specialist partner joins a call or discussion in which your personal information may be shared, or before we provide that partner with your contact or project information, we will explain the proposed involvement and obtain your permission. We will share only information reasonably relevant to that next step, unless disclosure is required by law.

Service providers that operate our systems

Limited technical service providers may process personal information on our behalf where necessary to host the website, transmit email, store information, maintain systems or provide security and related infrastructure. These providers are not given your information so that they can market their own products or services to you.

We do not sell personal information.

6. Email, hosting and cross-border processing

CoreUtilities uses third-party hosting, email and related technology services. Depending on how those providers operate their infrastructure, personal information may be processed or stored on systems located outside South Africa.

Where personal information is transferred across borders, CoreUtilities will take reasonable steps to ensure that the transfer and processing are handled in accordance with applicable POPIA requirements.

7. How do we protect personal information?

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal information against loss, unauthorised access, misuse, alteration or disclosure. Access to enquiry information is limited to persons who need it for legitimate CoreUtilities purposes or to authorised service providers acting on our behalf.

We also use controls intended to protect the website enquiry process against automated abuse and excessive submissions. No internet or electronic storage system can be guaranteed to be completely secure, but we review and improve safeguards where reasonably necessary.

8. How long do we keep personal information?

We keep personal information only for as long as it is reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, for lawful business-record purposes, to deal with an ongoing enquiry or relationship, to resolve disputes, or where retention is required or permitted by law.

When we are no longer authorised or reasonably required to retain personal information, it should be securely deleted, destroyed or de-identified as appropriate.

9. Your rights

Subject to POPIA and other applicable law, you may have the right to:

• ask whether CoreUtilities holds personal information about you;
• request access to personal information held about you;
• ask us to correct information that is inaccurate, incomplete, misleading or out of date;
• request deletion or destruction where we are no longer authorised to retain the information;
• object to certain processing of your personal information; and
• lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa).

To make a privacy request, contact us at coreutilities@cbithq.com. We may need to take reasonable steps to confirm your identity before releasing or changing personal information.

10. Information Regulator

If you believe that your personal information has been processed in a way that does not comply with POPIA, you may lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa).

11. External website services

The CoreUtilities website currently loads certain web fonts from Google Fonts. This means your browser may connect to Google's servers to retrieve those font resources. We do not currently use advertising or behavioural-tracking scripts in the website code supplied for launch.

If analytics, advertising, additional cookies or other tracking technologies are introduced in future, we will review this policy and implement any notices or consent controls that are required at that time.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy when our services, website, information-handling practices or legal requirements change. The current version will be published on this page together with its last-updated date.

13. Contact us about privacy

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, the personal information we hold about you, or how we use your information, contact CoreUtilities at coreutilities@cbithq.com.