Privacy and consent.

Updated 8 November 2026 · privacy-v7

Who is behind the platform?

The People’s Register is published by ANC Nelson Mandela Region and powered by Digital Origin. Read about the partnership. Privacy enquiries can be sent to peoplesregister.newsletter@gmail.com.

Weekly briefing opt-ins

The briefing form requests your email address and explicit consent. A confirmation email is required before a new subscription is activated. Your address is used to deliver the briefing you requested and to manage confirmation, unsubscribe and suppression records.

The email service is Brevo when the signup service is enabled. The revised website and server-side signup endpoint are hosted on Vercel. If the service is unavailable, the page must say so and must not claim that a subscription succeeded.

Preventing repeated confirmation requests

When briefing sign-up is enabled, the service uses the submitted email address and network address to calculate keyed identifiers. Private abuse-control storage holds those identifiers, request counts and expiry times rather than raw addresses. Network limits expire at the end of an hour and repeat-email limits after 15 minutes. Expired entries are ignored and removed on the next successful use; they can remain while the service is idle. The stored state has a fixed size limit. These controls are not used to profile readers or infer political beliefs.

Changing your choice

Use the unsubscribe control in a briefing email to stop future briefings. Suppression records may be retained to prevent accidental resubscription. Contact the publication if you need help with your subscription or information.

Editorial correspondence

A pitch, correction request or other email includes the information you choose to send. It is used to assess and respond to that enquiry. Sending a contribution does not sign you up for the briefing.

Reader evidence and research submissions

The reader form is for adults aged 18 or older. It collects the issue you choose to describe, topic, broad location, relevant page and optional source link. A name and email are optional. Email follow-up requires a separate choice; submitting never signs you up for the briefing.

Submissions are saved in private Vercel Blob storage in the Cape Town region for editorial review. Access is restricted to authorised project team members and the services needed to operate the desk. Submissions are not published automatically. We check evidence and remove identifying details before publishing findings.

Do not include ID numbers, private voter information or another person’s political beliefs. We do not request voting intention or party affiliation. The service uses a changing keyed network digest to limit repeated requests; it does not store your IP address in the submission record or use it to profile you.

Keep the receipt if you ask to access, correct or withdraw your submission. Contact the editorial team. We review unresolved cases for continued relevance after six months and remove information no longer needed; published correction notes may remain as part of the public record.

Advertising enquiries

We use the contact details, organisation, selected package and campaign brief you choose to send to respond to your enquiry and manage any resulting booking. An enquiry does not subscribe you to the briefing or promotional emails, and does not reserve advertising space.

When the online enquiry service is enabled, the form saves a private receipt and sends the enquiry to the TPR advertising desk through Brevo. The receipt and enquiry are held in private Vercel Blob storage; authorised staff and the services needed to handle the request can access them. Email correspondence is also held in the desk mailbox. A service confirmation records acceptance by the email provider, not proof that a message has been read. If email acceptance cannot be confirmed, the page says so and offers a direct email link.

Enquiry pages and form values are excluded from readership measurement. Separate abuse controls hold keyed network and email identifiers, counters and expiry times, rather than raw addresses in the limiter. Network and overall limits expire at the end of an hour; repeat-email limits expire after 15 minutes. Expired controls are removed on subsequent use and can remain while the service is idle. We do not use these records for reader profiling.

We review unsuccessful enquiries after six months and remove details no longer needed. Records needed for an agreed booking, accounting obligations or a dispute may need to be retained longer. To request access, correction or deletion, email the desk and include your receipt if you have one. A direct email link opens your own email application; nothing is sent until you send it.

Public-information registers

The candidate and station pages present published candidate lists and public venue information. They do not provide access to individual voter-registration records. Do not submit identity numbers or private voter information to the publication.

Aggregate readership measurement

Eligible public pages use the existing Vercel Web Analytics service to count visits by broad section. By default, reported URLs omit individual article, contributor, municipality, ward and station paths. Queries and fragments are always removed. Research, correction, advertising-enquiry and email-signup pages, receipts, APIs and preserved-source utilities are excluded. No form values or identity calls are configured.

Published results pages can also report a fixed action name, such as a requested image download, use of the seat calculator or a successful link copy. These counts use the broad elections section, without the selected municipality, party, ward, station, search or downloaded data. A requested share or download is not proof that it completed.

Measurement honours Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. It skips visits arriving from referrers with a query, fragment, private route or full external path, and visits with existing provider attribution. A normal external referring origin may be received by Vercel. These exclusions mean the counts cover an eligible subset of visits.

Vercel processes ordinary request metadata to derive aggregate visitor counts using a temporary hash, without analytics cookies. Read Vercel’s analytics privacy documentation. We use aggregate counts to maintain the publication and assess broad readership.

Tracking and sensitive inferences

The briefing signup does not request consent for email tracking. It is not a questionnaire about political beliefs or voting intention. The publication must not use a reader’s briefing subscription, device information or browsing activity to infer an individual’s political beliefs.

Security and retention

Access to submitted information should be restricted to the people and services needed to fulfil the chosen purpose. Do not send sensitive personal documents through an ordinary pitch or correction email without first discussing a suitable route with the team.