Privacy Policy

1. Who processes your information

The Responsible Party under the Protection of Personal Information Act (Act 4 of 2013) is Stage Studios (Pty) Ltd, 822 Nieuwhout Street, Pretoria, Gauteng. Our Information Officer can be reached at hello@stagestudio.co.za.

2. What we collect

• Account & contact data: name, email, phone, delivery address.
• Transaction data: orders, invoices, returns. Card details are tokenised by our payment gateway and never stored by us.
• Rental data: shoot context, identification, deposit authorisation.
• Advisor / search queries: what you typed into the AI Gear Advisor or smart search, to improve recommendations.
• Technical data: IP address, browser type, pages visited, analytics events.

3. Why we process it (lawful basis)

We rely on the following POPIA lawful bases:

• Performance of a contract (fulfilling your order, delivering rentals).
• Compliance with a legal obligation (tax, accounting, CPA).
• Our legitimate interest (fraud prevention, analytics, service improvement), balanced against your rights.
• Consent (marketing emails, optional analytics cookies). You can withdraw consent at any time.

4. Who we share with

• Payment gateways (PCI-DSS compliant) to process transactions.
• Couriers to deliver goods.
• Canon South Africa for warranty registration and claims.
• Hosting, email and analytics providers as data operators under POPIA.
• Regulatory or law enforcement bodies where legally required.

We do not sell your personal information.

5. Cross-border transfers

Some service providers (including our hosting and email platform) store data outside South Africa. We require comparable protection through contractual safeguards, as permitted under section 72 of POPIA.

6. Retention

We keep transactional records for seven years to comply with the Tax Administration Act. Marketing consents are retained until withdrawn. Support correspondence is retained for two years.

7. Your rights

Under POPIA you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you.
• Request correction or deletion, subject to legal retention obligations.
• Object to processing based on legitimate interest.
• Withdraw consent for marketing at any time using the unsubscribe link or by emailing us.
• Complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa at inforegulator.org.za.

8. Security

We apply technical and organisational safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the data, including TLS in transit, encrypted databases, access controls and periodic review. No system is perfectly secure; if a data breach occurs we notify you and the Information Regulator as required by POPIA.

9. Cookies

See our Cookie Policy for details of which cookies we set and how to manage them.

10. Changes

We update this policy from time to time. Material changes are announced on this page and notified by email where appropriate.

11. Contact

Information Officer: hello@stagestudio.co.za
Post: 822 Nieuwhout Street, Pretoria, Gauteng.