Privacy Policy

1.1 This Privacy Policy governs your use of the Placemint website (the “website”) and forms an integral part of it.

1.2 Placemint is an informational directory and resource. Its purpose is to help people in South Africa find and understand information about public healthcare facilities, medical training pathways, internship and community-service sites, postgraduate qualifications and medical schools. The website does not facilitate placement applications, placement swaps, or any transaction between users.

1.3 We are committed to protecting your privacy in line with the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA) and the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.

1.4 Please read this Privacy Policy together with our Terms and Conditions of use. By accessing the website you confirm that you have read and accepted both. If you do not agree, please do not use the website.

2.1 Browsing the directory does not require an account. Public visitors are not asked to register or provide personal information to read content.

2.2 Automatically collected technical data. Like most websites, our servers and analytics tools may automatically collect limited technical information such as your IP address, browser type, device type, pages visited and referring page, in order to operate, secure and improve the website.

2.3 Administrator accounts. The website has a restricted administration area used only by authorised Placemint administrators, who sign in with Google. This Privacy Policy section concerns ordinary visitors; administrator authentication data is processed solely to operate the admin tools.

2.4 Information you send us. If you contact us (for example to report a data error), we receive the information you choose to provide, such as your name, email address and message.

3.1 We use cookies and similar technologies for essential website functionality and for analytics.

3.2 Google AdSense. We may display advertising served by Google and its partners. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites.

3.3 Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet.

3.4 You may opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google’s Ads Settings (google.com/settings/ads), or opt out of some third-party vendors’ use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info/choices.

3.5 Where required (for example for visitors in the EEA, UK and Switzerland), advertising and analytics cookies are loaded only after you provide consent through our consent banner, consistent with Google’s consent requirements.

4.1 We use the limited information described above to operate, maintain, secure and improve the website, to understand which content is useful, to respond to your enquiries, and to display advertising that helps fund the service.

4.2 We do not sell your personal information.

5.1 We share information only with service providers that help us run the website, such as our hosting provider, analytics provider and advertising partner (Google), each of which processes data under its own terms.

5.2 We may disclose information if required to do so by law.

6.1 Facility, training and qualification information on Placemint is compiled and curated from publicly available sources and may be incomplete, out of date, or contain errors. It is provided for general information only and is not professional, medical, legal or career advice.

6.2 If you believe any information about a facility, qualification or institution is incorrect, please contact us so we can review and correct it. We aim to label the source of information where practical and to correct verified errors promptly.

7.1 Subject to POPIA, you may request access to the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to its processing. To exercise these rights, contact us using the details on our Contact page.

8.1 We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect information against unauthorised access, loss or misuse. However, no method of transmission over the internet is completely secure.

9.1 We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time; the latest version will always be published on this page.

9.2 For any privacy question or request, please use our Contact page.