Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is https://www.oasisconnect.co.za.

PRIVACY POLICY in Detail

1. Our purpose is to inspire conversations and enrich the lives of South Africans. We do this by providing people with breaking news, live sports, and compelling entertainment.

2. We engage with people across South Africa and the world, and viewers play an important role in informing the advertising and content decisions we make. We want you to feel safe when you visit our channels and platforms. Our Privacy Policy (“Policy”) tells you when and how we collect your information, what information we collect, what we do with it, and how we might share it.

3. Whenever we collect and use your information, we comply with all applicable laws in South Africa

4. Thank you for taking the time to read our Policy.

About this Policy

5. This Policy applies to any personal information we collect or receive when we provide our services or when you interact with us. When we say “your information” in this Policy, we mean your personal information or personal data, which means any information about you.

6. When we say “us” or “we”, we mean Oasis News Connect. This Policy applies to all the services we offer, including Politics, Economy and Sports

7. If you don’t agree to this Policy, please stop using our sites, apps and services. You can also de-register if you’d like to stop hearing from us – we explain how to do that below.

8. Some of our services may have their privacy policies, which will be relevant to you when you are using those services and they will take priority.

9. We may need to change or update this Policy to reflect the law or changes to our practices. If we do, we’ll communicate the changes in a way we think is appropriate. Any changes will apply from the day we communicate them.

Who does the Policy apply to?

10. This Policy applies to:

(a) Anyone who uses our services. This includes anyone who:

(i) registers an account with us;

(ii) visits our websites or apps, or any other Oasis News Connect websites or apps;

(iii) engages with our social media pages; or

(iv) uses the Private Platform services.

(b) Anyone who enters one of our competitions (excluding Educational competitions).

(d) Anyone who applies to be part of a program via an application form on our Oasis News Connect service.

11. If you let anyone use your account on our other services, e.g. your family members with their own separate profiles, please make sure they have read this Policy, as we may collect their information too.

12. If you give us information about anyone else, it’s important they have agreed to you giving us their information and that they are aware of this Policy. If they haven’t agreed, then please don’t provide that information to us.

What information do we collect?

13. Depending on which of our services you use, we may collect:

(a) Contact details so we can recognize you, register and protect your account and so we can get in touch with you. These may include your name, email address, gender identity, year of birth and password.

(b) Details about any profiles you create on your account, including any kids’ profiles.

(c) Details about how you use our services or how anyone using your account uses our services. This includes what and when you watch, what content you view and what you add to your watchlists. This helps give us a better idea of what shows to tell you about, what content and ads to show you and to improve our services and your experience on our services.

(d) Your device ID, IP address, location, device type and the version of our app you’re using.

(e) Information about the quality of the service you are receiving.

(f) Copies of any communications you send us or call recordings if you call us.

(g) Information you provide when you sign up to a competition.

(h) Financial details (which may also include your address) you provide if you pay for our products or services.

14. If you may be appearing in one of our shows, except our news and current affairs shows (which fall under separate newsgathering practices), we will normally get you to sign a form and tell you how your information may be used. If you apply to be part of one of our programmes via an application form, or if you apply to be a contestant on a reality show, we will collect information from you (or anyone you authorise) to help us consider your application.

15. So we can improve the accuracy of information we hold about you (e.g. for your customer profile) or to make sure the services and ads we provide are relevant, we sometimes collect information about you from:

(a) our advertising partners, our commercial partners or from third parties that specialise in helping our advertising partners find the right people to show their ads to; and

(b) any other third parties where we believe you have consented or we can do so under the Privacy Act.

Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies

16. If you use one of our sites, we use cookies and other tracking technologies to collect viewing and usage information. This helps us undertake analytics and reporting to understand what is popular with our services and how we can improve them. Cookies and other tracking technologies help us know when you visit our sites, where you are, what you look at and how you got there (like if you clicked through from an email we’ve sent or an online ad).

17. We also use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your experience on our sites, including keeping you signed in, showing you content that is relevant to you and working with our commercial partners to deliver you relevant advertising.

How do we use your information?

18. We use your information in different ways depending on how you engage with us. We want to make sure we make your experience as relevant to you as possible, so we use all the information we collect about you whenever you use any of our services and we combine it to create a profile about you. This means we might match the information we have about you from when you use Oasis News Connect when we collect other information about you e.g. from our advertising partners when you have agreed to this and when we are able to do so under the Privacy Act. This allows us to better understand your preferences, to personalise your experiences when you use any of our services and to make sure you see more relevant content and ads.

19. If we do any matching with the information provided by another party and we need to use a specialist third-party provider, we won’t share the results of that matching process with any other party, unless your information has been aggregated and anonymized.

20. When you register for or sign up to any of our services, we may assign you a unique ID number. This gives you a better experience because it means we can still recognize you if you sign in using the same account on a new device or through a different app such as the Oasis News Connect+ app.

21. We also use your information in the following ways:

(a) To send you advertising, including online, via social media, mail, email, or text message.

(b) To improve your experience with our services or to provide you with ads that are more relevant to you:

(i) We try to make sure you only see ads that will be relevant or of interest to you. This could be ads for our shows or ads from our advertisers.

(ii) We sometimes use your information in an ad that is shown to you, or users, of your Oasis News Connect+ account. For example, you might see an ad addressing you by first name or offering goods or services near your general location. Where we use a third party to insert your information into an ad, we do not share your name or information with any advertiser or give an advertiser permission to use your information (except for aggregated and/or anonymized information) unless you’ve permitted us to do that. If you’d like to opt out of receiving ads that use your first name, you can request this through our Contact Us form.

(iii) We may display ads for our shows we think you’ll be interested in when you are using Facebook and Instagram through a tool offered by Facebook called Custom Audiences.

(iv) We may also display ads for our shows we think you’ll be interested in when you are using Google apps and services like YouTube and Google Search.

(d) To make your experience of Oasis News Connect services more personalized. This includes personalizing your homepage and generating recommended content.

(e) If you get in touch with us as part of our news and current affairs services, we may use any information you give us as part of our reporting.

(f) To communicate with you. This might include responding to your questions, sending you surveys to better understand how we can improve our services or understanding what functionality you’re not using and why, answering any issues you may have, and considering your application to appear on an Oasis News Connect show.

(g) To operate our competitions.

(h) To improve our services, including testing new products.

(i) For commercial, finance, and revenue reporting to optimize future ad delivery and total experiences on our platforms.

(j) To provide aggregated and anonymized reports and analysis to our advertising and commercial partners, our agencies and our content distributors.

(k) To look at website traffic, analyse trends and generally help us build a big-picture view of how our sites are working. These insights are important because they help us to make the sites better for you and our advertisers.

22. We only keep your information for as long as we need, e.g. when we need it for personalising your experience, where we need it to improve our services or when delivering other services to you.

When do we share your information?

23. We are very careful if we have to share your information. We never sell your information to any third parties but do sometimes have to share your information so we can provide our services and make sure they are relevant to you. We may share your information in the following ways:

(a) Our third party service providers who help us with troubleshooting, data engineering, data pipeline building, modelling and technical issues.

(b) To our advertising and commercial partners, our agencies and our content distributors, but we only ever share this information in aggregated and anonymised form to provide things like insights, so you are never identified.

(d) Where we are able to do so under the Privacy Act, including responding to requests from law enforcement agencies.

How do we keep your information safe?

24. We know your information is important and we make sure we comply with the Privacy Act.

25. We take steps to keep your information secure, whether your information is stored in South Africa

26. When we store or share your information with anyone, we make sure we take steps to protect your information.

27. Our sites and apps may contain links to and from websites that aren’t controlled by us. If you follow a link to any other website, they have their own rules around privacy – we suggest you check these. We don’t accept any responsibility or liability for anyone else’s policies or for any transactions that you enter into with them.

Your privacy: what choices and rights do you have?

What if you want to take a break?

28. We send push notifications to anyone using our services on mobile devices. Permissions for push notifications are managed by you via your mobile device settings. We also send you promotional material via email, this is managed by you in your Oasis News Platform+ account.

29. You can de-register from Oasis News Connect+ through our Contact Us form. If you de-register, we’ll delete your name and email address from our database within 30 days and we’ll delete any other information we hold about you, unless we need to keep it.

What if you want to access your information?

30. Under the Privacy Act, you will typically have the right to request to see the information we have about you. You can also ask us to correct your personal information that’s inaccurate, out-of-date, incomplete or irrelevant.

31. If you’d like access to your information, please request this through our Contact Us form.

32. More information on your rights is also available at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s website at https://www.oasisconnect.co.za/.

How can you get in touch with us?

33. If you have any questions or want to make a complaint, you can contact us through our Contact Us form.

PRIVACY POLICY in Summary

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.