Privacy Policy

Principles

At Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services, we have a few fundamental principles with regard to privacy:

  • We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
  • We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
  • We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information our website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
  • We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
  • We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.
  • We comply with (strict!) South African data protection laws.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

At Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services, we aim to supply 5-star air-conditioning and commercial refrigeration services promptly and cost-effectively.

To deliver that service, we need to store some of your private information – your name, email and physical address, for example. This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you:

  • Use our website
  • Send us email
  • Engage with us through messaging software like Telegram and WhatsApp
  • Generally do business with us, online or off-line

This Privacy Policy also applies to information we collect when you apply for a job at Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services.

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our services, to communicate with you, or to make our services better.

We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our services, and from outside sources, as follows:

Information You Provide to Us

When you fill in a form on our website, for example, or send us an email.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

  • Log information: Like most service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information.
  • Usage information: We collect information about visitors to our website, e.g., page views. We use this information to, for example, provide our services to you, get insights on how people use our site so we can make our services better, and understand user retention.
  • Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our site from certain geographic regions.
  • Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services uses cookies to help us identify return visits, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

  • To provide our services. For example, to fulfill an order, provide customer service, process payments, and verify user information.
  • To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our website.
  • To market our services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing.
  • To protect our services, our users, and the public. For example, by detecting security incidents; detecting and protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services.
  • To fix problems with our website. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
  • To communicate with you.
  • To recruit and hire employees.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

These are our legal grounds for processing information about you:

(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you, or

(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or

(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information to provide the services you require, or

(5) You have given us your consent, for example by submitting a form on our site.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below:

  • Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our services or process the information on our behalf. We require our independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
  • Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you. This includes payment providers that process your payment, email and chat delivery services, those that assist us with our marketing efforts and help us understand and enhance our services (like analytics providers). We require vendors to agree to our privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
  • Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
  • To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
  • Business transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
  • With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction.
  • Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our services.
  • Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via email), we reserve the right to publish that request in de-identified form to respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

We do not sell, trade or give away our users’ data, full stop.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public. For example, should we decide to allow comments on on our site in future, those comments would be public.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it.

For example, we keep web server logs that record information about a visitor to our site, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 90 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyse traffic to our website and investigate issues if something goes wrong on our site.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

In the unlikely event of a security breach on our site exposing your private information, we will notify you as soon as possible after we had become aware of the problem, in accordance with the privacy legislation that applies in South Africa. (See next section.)

Your Rights

If you are located in South Africa and in certain other parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

South Africa

Data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

  • Request access to your personal data;
  • Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
  • Object to our use and processing of your personal data; and
  • Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data.

On this page you can read more about your rights, as well as the procedures to follow if you choose to exercise them.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, you can read more about your rights in the relevant EU regulations here. You can also follow this link to an EU-commissioned website that explains the legislation.

Because the services of Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services are offered in South Africa, the information that we process about you when you use the services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us or third-party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above.

We will take appropriate measures to ensure that your personal information is handled adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy, as required by the applicable laws.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) requires us to provide Californian residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it.

The CCPA also requires us to provide a list of the “categories” of personal information we collect, as that term is defined in the law. Here they are, depending on the services used:

  • Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
  • Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example);
  • Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender as part of a research survey for us);
  • Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our services);
  • Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
  • Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as pictures, if you uploaded any);
  • Professional or employment-related information (for example, information you provide in a job application); and
  • Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

You can find more information about what we collect and sources of that information in the Information We Collect section above.

We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section above and we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section.

If you are a Californian resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:

  • Request to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, the categories of third parties we share it with, and the specific pieces of information we collect about you;
  • Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
  • Opt out of any sale of personal information; and
  • Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights under the CCPA.

Contacting Us About These Rights

If you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, you can find detailed information about how to do so on this page.

Other Things You Should Know

Analytics Services Provided by Others

Other parties may provide analytics services via our services. These providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage and determine the popularity of certain content. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services and does not cover the collection of information by any third-party analytics providers.

Third-Party Software and Services

WordPress, the software on which the website is built, has a separate privacy policy. You can view it here.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Wentworth’s Refrigeration Services encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (like adding a statement to our homepage, or sending you a notification through email. Your further use of the services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

Thanks for reading.

Change log

  • September 8, 2021: First version of this Privacy Policy.