Privacy Policy

This policy is written for the four groups it affects: the venues we supply, the staff who use the tills, the customers who buy from those venues, and the people who visit this website or connect a Google or YouTube account to one of our internal tools.

1. Who we are

Sam Squared Softwares (Pty) Ltd (registration 2026/536077/07), 84 Donovan Street, Glen Austin, Midrand, Gauteng, 1685, South Africa.

Privacy enquiries and requests: [email protected]

2. The two hats we wear

POPIA distinguishes between the party who decides why information is processed (the responsible party) and the party who processes it on that party's behalf (the operator). Which one we are depends on the data:

3. What we process, and why

3.1 Venue and contact information

Business name, registration details, trading address, and the names, work email addresses and phone numbers of the people we deal with. We use these to quote, contract, invoice, support and communicate with you. Our lawful basis is the performance of our contract with you and our legitimate business interests.

3.2 Payment information

Card payments are processed by Paystack, a licensed payment processor. Card numbers are entered on Paystack's systems, not ours. We receive and retain the transaction reference, amount, date, outcome and a masked card descriptor for accounting and dispute handling. We do not store full card numbers or security codes.

3.3 Staff information inside the platform

Where a venue sets up staff logins, the platform holds a name or identifier, a role, and a record of till actions taken under that login — sales, voids, comps, discounts, drawer opens, tab transfers and logins. This exists so that variance and shrinkage can be attributed accurately, which is the point of the product.

3.4 Customer information inside the platform

Venues may capture a customer's name, contact details or tab history — for account tabs, bookings or loyalty. What is captured is the venue's choice, made in the venue's own privacy notice. We process it only to run the platform.

3.5 Technical and diagnostic data

To keep installations working we collect logs, error reports, version and licence-verification records, and a hardware fingerprint of the on-site server. Licence checks record which venue verified and when, and nothing about your trade.

4. Aggregated model improvement — opt-in only

We would like to improve our detection models using patterns drawn from across venues. We do this only where a venue has opted in, and only with data that has been anonymised and aggregated so that it does not identify your venue, your prices, your staff or your customers. You can opt out at any time by emailing us, and doing so does not reduce the service you receive.

5. Who we share information with

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. We share only with:

• Paystack — to take and reconcile payments and handle disputes.
• Our infrastructure and tooling providers — cloud hosting, backup, email, support and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, including HubSpot (see section 6.1), under contracts requiring confidentiality and appropriate security.
• Our professional advisers — accountants, auditors and lawyers, where they need it and under a duty of confidence.
• Authorities — where the law obliges us, or to establish or defend a legal claim.

5.1 Information leaving South Africa

Some of the providers above operate outside South Africa. Where personal information is transferred across a border, we do so on the bases POPIA section 72 permits — including binding contractual protections with the recipient. For example, our CRM provider, HubSpot, is a United States company, and our HubSpot account is hosted in the European Union. If you want to know which providers we currently use and where they are located, ask us and we will tell you.

6. This website

Our website is a static set of pages. It sets no advertising cookies. It does use analytics and chat cookies from HubSpot, as section 6.1 explains. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs, which may include your IP address, for security and availability purposes. If you email us from a link on this site, we hold that correspondence as described in section 3.1.

If you use the contact form, what you type (your name, email address, business name, the option you pick and your message) is sent to us by email through FormSubmit, a form-to-email service. The site may also save a copy in our own lead database, hosted on Cloudflare. We hold it as described in section 3.1.

6.1 Analytics, chat and our CRM

We use HubSpot, a customer relationship management (CRM) service, to keep track of the people and businesses we deal with, and we may add your enquiry to it so we can follow up. Every page of this site loads HubSpot's tracking code, which:

• sets cookies (__hstc, hubspotutk, __hssc and __hssrc) that show us how many people visit, which pages they read, how they found the site, what type of device they use and roughly where they are, worked out from their IP address;
• runs the chat window. If you chat with us, HubSpot also sets a messagesUtk cookie so your conversation can carry on later, and we keep the conversation and any details you give us in HubSpot;
• can link your earlier visits to your contact record once you give us your email address, for example in a chat, so we can see which pages interested you.

None of these cookies lasts longer than six months. We use this information to improve the site and to follow up on enquiries, and our lawful basis is our legitimate business interest. You can block or delete the cookies in your browser settings, and the rest of the site works without them. You can also ask us to delete what we hold about you in HubSpot (see section 9).

7. How long we keep it

• Contracts, invoices and accounting records — retained for the period South African tax and company law requires, currently five years from the end of the relevant tax year, and longer where a dispute is live.
• Venue operational data — kept while your subscription is active. On termination, we provide a final export on written request within 30 days, after which we delete operational data other than what we must retain by law.
• Support correspondence and logs — retained while useful for support and product quality, and then deleted.

8. Security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal information, including encrypted backups, access controls on our systems, transport encryption for data in transit, and separation of production credentials from on-site installations. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If a security compromise affects personal information, we will notify the Information Regulator and the affected parties as POPIA section 22 requires.

9. Your rights

Under POPIA you may ask us to confirm what personal information we hold about you, to give you a copy of it, to correct or delete information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete, misleading or unlawfully obtained, and to object to processing in the circumstances the Act allows.

Email [email protected] and we will respond within a reasonable period. We may need to verify your identity first. Where we hold the information as an operator for a venue — for example a staff till record — we will refer you to that venue, since the decisions are theirs to make.

You may also complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa): inforegulator.org.za, [email protected].

10. Changes

We may update this policy. The current version always lives at this address with its effective date at the top; for material changes we email the billing contact on each account.

11. Google and YouTube API Services

Some of our internal tools connect to Google accounts through Google's APIs. This section explains what those tools do with the data they can reach.

11.1 The Glowing Sea Animals Uploader

This is a private tool we built to publish videos to YouTube channels we own or manage. It uses YouTube API Services. By connecting a YouTube account to it, you agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google's handling of your data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.

The tool asks for two Google permissions: upload videos to the connected YouTube channel (youtube.upload) and read the channel's own videos, playlists and channel details (youtube.readonly). With those permissions it can:

• upload video files from our own computers to the connected channel, together with the title, description, tags, thumbnail, audience setting and scheduled publish time we choose for each video;
• read the connected channel's own details so it can confirm which channel it is uploading to and report on what it has uploaded.

It never reads, stores or shares data belonging to viewers or to any other YouTube account. It does not run advertising, analytics or profiling of any kind.

11.2 What we store, and where

The OAuth token that grants the tool access is stored in a local file on the computer that runs the tool, together with the client credentials Google issued to our project. The tool also keeps a local log of the video titles and YouTube video IDs it created. We keep these only as long as the tool is in use, and we do not transfer them to third parties or to any other system.

11.3 Limited use

Our use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Google user data is used only to provide and improve the features described in this section; it is never used for advertising, never sold, and never shared for anyone else's marketing.

11.4 Revoking access

You can remove the tool's access to your Google account at any time from your Google account permissions page. Doing so invalidates the stored token immediately. You can also ask us to delete the locally stored token and log by emailing [email protected], and we will do so within 30 days.