Privacy policy
The short version: Watchalot has no accounts and doesn't ask for your name, email or anything else about you. We use Google Analytics to count visits, and the ads on the site come from Google. Both use cookies; you can switch off personalised ads and opt out of Analytics.
Who we are
Watchalot (watchalot.co.za) is a price-history tracker for products sold on Takealot, run by Haiko Nieuwoudt in South Africa. It is independent and not affiliated with Takealot. Questions about this policy or your information: hi@haiko.co.za.
What we collect
- Your searches aren't stored. When you search or paste a Takealot link, we use it to find the product and then forget it. If it's a product we don't track yet, we start tracking it, without recording who added it.
- Your IP address, briefly, when you add a product. To stop the site being flooded with automated requests, we note the IP address of each "Track it" request that adds a new product and limit how many can be added per hour. These records are deleted after 24 hours. Our nightly database backups, kept for 14 days, can include those that were present at the time of the backup.
- No visit logs on our server. Our server handles your IP address to deliver each page, as any website must, but doesn't keep a log of visits.
- No cookies of our own. Watchalot's own code doesn't set cookies. Google Analytics and Google's ads do, as described below.
Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics to understand how the site is used: how many people visit, which pages they view, how they found the site, and roughly where they are (country or city) and what device and browser they use. Google Analytics sets cookies to tell visits apart and collects this information on Google's servers; it doesn't give us your name or contact details, and it doesn't store your IP address. We use the reports only to improve Watchalot.
You can opt out of Google Analytics on all websites with Google's opt-out browser add-on, or by blocking cookies in your browser. Learn more about how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
Advertising
Watchalot is free to use and supported by ads served by Google AdSense.
- Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to this website and other websites.
- Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
- You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google's Ads Settings, or opt out of some third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info. You'll still see ads, just less tailored ones.
- Learn more about how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
Which ads are shown, and what Google collects to show them, is decided by Google under its own privacy policy, not by us. Ads on Watchalot never affect a product's price history or deal verdict.
Other services your browser connects to
- Takealot: product images load directly from Takealot's servers.
- Google Fonts: the site's typefaces load from Google's servers.
These services receive your IP address when your browser fetches those files, under their own privacy policies.
Your rights
Under South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) you can ask what personal information we hold about you, and ask us to correct or delete it. Because we keep so little, there usually won't be anything to find, but email us and we'll check. If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information, you can complain to the Information Regulator.
Changes
If we change what we collect, we'll update this page and the date at the top.