Privacy Policy

THE FOUNDER NETWORK PTY LTD ("FOUNDER", "we") is the responsible party / data controller for personal information processed through the FOUNDER platform. This policy is written to comply with South Africa's POPIA, the EU/UK GDPR and the California CPRA. Contact our Information Officer at legal@thefoundernetwork.co.za.

1. What we collect

• Account data — name, email, password hash, plan, referral code, alert phone number.
• Business data — business name, category, location, currency, catalogue, prices, address, WhatsApp number, brand assets and social links you provide.
• Customer conversation data — WhatsApp messages, voice notes and transcripts, phone numbers, quotations, orders and invoices exchanged between your business and its customers via our AI salesman.
• Generation inputs — the budget, location and skills you enter to generate business ideas, and prompts used for ads, flyers and brand kits.
• Billing data — handled by Paddle for USD software purchases or Paystack for ZAR software purchases. We receive transaction IDs, plan and status but never full card numbers.
• Technical data — IP address, device/browser, logs and cookies strictly necessary for login and security.

2. Why we process it (lawful bases)

• To provide the Service you contracted for (contract performance): generating plans, running the AI salesman, sending WhatsApp messages, issuing documents.
• To bill you and prevent fraud (contract / legal obligation).
• To send operational alerts and digests you enabled (consent — toggle off in Settings any time).
• To improve reliability and security (legitimate interest). We do not sell personal information and do not use your customers' conversations to train third-party models.

3. Processors and international transfers

We use: Twilio (WhatsApp messaging), Paddle (USD software billing), Paystack (existing ZAR software subscriptions), fastFOREX and Frankfurter (live and fallback daily exchange-rate data respectively; no customer details are sent), AI model providers via a secured gateway (Anthropic Claude for text, OpenAI Whisper/TTS for voice, Google Gemini and fal.ai for images/video), and cloud hosting/database providers. Data may be processed outside your country; we rely on standard contractual clauses and processor agreements that provide POPIA/GDPR-equivalent protection.

Contact messages are stored in our restricted admin inbox. Cloudflare Turnstile verifies submissions, and managed Resend email notifications send only a ticket reference to our company inboxes. Your message and reply address are not included in those notifications. Hashed submission-rate counters and CAPTCHA token fingerprints expire automatically.

4. Retention

• Account and business data: for the life of your account and 90 days after closure.
• Conversations, quotations, orders, invoices: while your account is active (you may delete conversations at any time); financial documents up to 5 years where tax law requires.
• Voice notes and audio replies: 30 days, transcripts retained with the conversation.
• Server logs: 30 days. Billing records at Paddle and Paystack follow their respective retention requirements.

5. Your rights

You may access, correct, export or delete your personal information, object to or restrict processing, withdraw consent, and lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa), your EU/UK supervisory authority, or the California Privacy Protection Agency. California residents: we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. Email legal@thefoundernetwork.co.za; we respond within 30 days.

6. Your customers' data

When you use FOUNDER to talk to your customers, you are the responsible party for that data and we act as your operator/processor. You must have a lawful basis to message them, honour opt-outs (the AI hands over to you when a customer asks for a human) and only upload data you are entitled to use.

7. Security

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt, sessions use signed tokens, all traffic is encrypted with TLS, inbound WhatsApp webhooks are signature-verified, and Paddle and Paystack webhooks are signature-verified. Access to production data is restricted to authorised staff.

8. Cookies

We use strictly necessary cookies for authentication (httpOnly) and local-storage entries to remember referral codes and the public billing-country choice. We do not use advertising cookies.

9. Changes

We will notify you in-app or by email of material changes at least 14 days in advance. Questions: legal@thefoundernetwork.co.za · THE FOUNDER NETWORK PTY LTD, The Parks Unit 2 Block 2, 22 Century Boulevard, Johannesburg, 2191, South Africa.