How Univio looks after your information.

Univio ("we", "us", "our") is a South African service that guides learners through university admissions over WhatsApp. We are the responsible party under the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) for the personal information described here.

If you have any concern about how your information is handled, contact the Information Officer first. If you remain unsatisfied, you have the right to complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa (inforeg@justice.gov.za · inforegulator.org.za).

We only collect what we need to calculate your APS, match you to programmes and bursaries, and answer your questions.

We do not collect: your banking or financial account details, ID or passport numbers, your home or street address (province only), or any special personal information such as race, health, religion, political opinions or biometric data.

Many of the learners we help are in Grade 11 or 12, and some are under 18 — which POPIA treats as a child. We take this seriously.

• Where a learner is under 18, POPIA generally requires the consent of a competent person — usually a parent or legal guardian — for us to process their information.
• A parent or guardian can contact us at privacy@univio.co.za at any time to ask what we hold about their child, to correct it, or to have it deleted.
• We only collect what's needed for admissions guidance, and we never knowingly use a learner's information for advertising or sell it to anyone.

If you're a parent, guardian, teacher or school and have any concern about a learner's information, please reach out and we'll respond directly.

Your subjects and marks are used to calculate your APS for each university's own rules, and to match you to programmes and bursaries you qualify for. Your fields of interest and quiz answers refine those matches.

When you tap an option or open a link in the chat, we record that so the service works and so we can improve guidance. When you ask a question, your message is processed to generate an answer (see AI, below).

We use your information to run and improve Univio's guidance — not to make any automated decision about you that has a legal or similarly significant effect. The actual decision to admit or fund you is always made by the university or funder, not by Univio.

By default, your personal information stays within Univio and the service providers that help us run it (listed below).

• Universities and funders: we only share information that could identify you individually — like your contact details or full profile — with a specific university or bursary funder after you've been asked and said yes, for a specific application or opportunity.
• Aggregated insights: we may report combined, non-identifying statistics (for example, how many learners in a province qualified for a field) that do not identify you.
• We never sell your information to anyone, for any purpose.

We use a small number of trusted providers to run Univio. Each only processes your information on our instruction, for the purposes in this notice:

• WhatsApp Business (Meta) — to deliver the chat and messages. Processed outside South Africa.
• Our AI language-model provider — to understand your questions and generate guidance in the chat. Processed outside South Africa.
• Cloud hosting & database provider — to securely store your profile and records so the service works.
• Analytics — to understand engagement at an aggregated level and improve the service.

Where a provider processes information outside South Africa, we take reasonable steps consistent with Section 72 of POPIA to keep it protected to a comparable standard.

Access to your identifying information is restricted to the Univio team who need it, and protected with reasonable technical and organisational safeguards. In the event of a security compromise, we'll notify the Information Regulator and affected users without undue delay, as required under Section 22 of POPIA.

We keep your information while your Univio profile is active so the service keeps working for you. After that:

Univio's matching is guidance: it shows you programmes and bursaries you likely qualify for based on your marks and preferences. It does not make a binding decision about you — universities and funders make the actual admission and funding decisions.

If we ever introduce a feature that makes an automated decision with a legal or similarly significant effect, we'll tell you plainly what goes into it, give you a way to ask for human review, and ask for your consent before it applies to you.

Under POPIA, you have the right to:

• Know what personal information we hold about you, and request a copy
• Ask us to correct information that's wrong or out of date
• Ask us to delete your information or stop processing it
• Object to processing — including stopping messages at any time
• Withdraw consent at any point (this doesn't undo anything done before you withdrew)
• Complain to the Information Regulator if you think your information's been mishandled

To use any of these right now: reply STOP or DELETE on the Univio WhatsApp number, or email privacy@univio.co.za.

As Univio grows, we'll update this notice and, where the change is significant, ask you to review it again. The current version always lives at univio.co.za/privacy.