Privacy policy — Your Receptionist

The short version. We answer phone calls your business misses, write down who called and what they wanted, and send that to you. To do that, the call passes through specialist speech companies outside South Africa. We keep your leads and account details in Johannesburg. We do not sell anything to anyone. Ask us to delete it and we will.

1. Who we are

Your Receptionist is a service of buyitfastest, a business registered in South Africa. You can reach us at info@buyitfastest.co.za about anything in this policy, including a request to delete your information.

This policy is written to meet the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA).

2. Two different roles, which matter

POPIA distinguishes between the party who decides what happens to personal information (the responsible party) and the party who processes it on their behalf (the operator). We are both, in different parts of the service:

Information	Our role
Your details as a customer or enquirer — name, business, phone, email, area	Responsible party. We decide how this is used.
Your callers' details — what they said, their name, number, the job	Operator. That information belongs to your business. We handle it on your instructions, and you remain responsible to your own customers for it.

Section 6 of our terms is the written operator agreement POPIA section 20 requires.

3. What we collect

From you, the business owner

Name, business name, trade, mobile number, email address, the areas you work in
What you tell the assistant about your business — hours, prices, service areas, the questions you get asked
Payment records. We never see or store your card. PayFast handles the card and tells us only whether a payment succeeded.
Ordinary technical information: your browser's user agent and the page you arrived from

From people who call you

The number they called from, and the number they gave for a callback
Audio of the call, and a written transcript of it
What we extract from that: their name, suburb, what the job is, how urgent it is
A record that the recording disclosure was played, and when

4. Callers are told, before anything is recorded

At the start of every call, before any recording begins, the assistant says that it is an assistant and not a person, and that the call is recorded. It never claims to be human, and if asked directly it says so plainly. We log that this happened on each call.

5. Why we may process it at all

To perform the contract with you — we cannot answer your calls without processing them.
Legitimate interests — your caller has rung a business expecting to be helped, and taking a message so the business can call back is what they were trying to achieve.
Consent, where we ask for it, such as marketing emails. You can withdraw it at any time.
Legal obligation, for records such as tax and payment history.

6. Who else processes it, and where

Answering a phone call with a voice assistant is not something we do alone. These companies process personal information for us, and some are outside South Africa. POPIA section 72 requires us to say so rather than imply otherwise.

Who	What they do	Where
Google Firebase	Stores your leads, transcripts, account and usage records	South Africa — Johannesburg region
Twilio	Carries the phone call, the SMS and the WhatsApp message	United States and EU
ElevenLabs	Hears the caller and speaks the reply — the audio of the call	United States
Anthropic	Turns the transcript into a structured lead	United States
PayFast	Takes the subscription payment. Holds the card; we do not	South Africa
Afrihost	Sends our email and hosts our mailbox	South Africa

Each of them is bound by their own contract to process the information only for the purpose we give them. None of them is permitted to sell it. We do not sell personal information to anybody, for any purpose.

7. How long we keep it

What	How long
Call recordings	Deleted once the lead has been dealt with, and in any case within 90 days
Transcripts and leads	While you are a customer, and 12 months after you leave
Your account and billing records	Five years, because tax law requires it
Enquiries that never became customers	12 months, then deleted

Ask us to delete something sooner and we will, unless a law requires us to keep it — in which case we will tell you which law.

8. Your rights under POPIA

Ask what we hold about you, and get a copy.
Correct anything wrong or incomplete.
Have it deleted, where we are not required to keep it.
Object to processing based on legitimate interests.
Withdraw consent for marketing, at any time, without giving a reason.
Complain to the Information Regulator.

Email info@buyitfastest.co.za. We answer within 30 days and there is no charge for a reasonable request.

The Information Regulator of South Africa: inforegulator.org.za, complaints.IR@justice.gov.za.

9. If your caller wants their information removed

People who ring your business can ask us directly, at the address above. Because that information belongs to your business, we will normally tell you about the request and act on it with you rather than behind you — unless the law requires otherwise.

10. Security

Information is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is restricted to the people who need it to run the service. Credentials are held in a managed secret store and never in our code. Payment card details never reach us at all.

If personal information is ever compromised in a way that creates a real risk to anyone, we will notify the Information Regulator and the people affected, as POPIA section 22 requires.

11. Cookies

This site sets no advertising or tracking cookies, and we do not use third-party analytics. Nothing here follows you around the internet.

12. Changes

If we change this policy in a way that affects you, we will email you before it takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

Written to be read, not to be hidden behind. If anything here is unclear, or you think we have got something wrong, email us and we will fix it or explain it.