Privacy Policy

Who we are

The South African Go Association (SAGA) is the national organization responsible for promoting and developing Go in South Africa. SAGA has been affiliated to the International Go Federation since 1993.

Static site visitors

This website is hosted as a static site. This means that visitors cannot interact with the site to leave comments or make other contributions. The visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string may appear in the website logs.

Visitor statistics

We count page views so that we know which parts of the site are actually read. We use GoatCounter, which sets no cookies and stores nothing at all in your browser, so there is no consent banner to click away.

What is recorded. The page you viewed, the referring site, and your browser, operating system, screen size, language and country. These are kept as separate daily totals with no way to link them back to one another or to a single visit.

What is not recorded. Your IP address, your full browser identification string, and any form of tracking identifier. Your IP address is used only, in memory and for a few hours, to avoid counting the same visitor twice; it is never written down. Pages that carry information in their web address — the membership confirmation link, for one — are not counted at all, so no address or confirmation link ever reaches the counter. Neither are the pages behind the ranking administrators’ login.

GoatCounter is operated from Ireland and its servers are in Finland and Germany. This is a transfer outside South Africa, to countries whose data-protection law is comparable to POPIA, and to the same part of the world as the site itself, which is hosted in Sweden.

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.

Anonymous participation

If you want to take part in SAGA events, but do not want your participation mentioned online, please notify the event organiser. If you wish to have your name removed from posts on this site, please contact the webmaster.

Membership

SAGA keeps a register of its members. The constitution requires one — among other things, a valid Annual General Meeting depends on knowing who the members are — and this section explains what goes into it.

What we ask for. Your name, your email address and your club. If you are not attached to a club you can say so and tell us where you live instead; otherwise your province is worked out from your club rather than asked for separately. You can optionally give a phone or WhatsApp number, the name of someone at your club who knows you, and your SAGA player handle if you have one. We ask whether you are under 18, and if you are, for a parent or guardian’s name and email address.

What we do not ask for. We do not collect ID numbers, dates of birth for adults, physical addresses, banking details, or anything about race or gender.

What we publish. We publish member totals, broken down by club and province, together with the year they refer to. Your name appears in a published list only if you ticked the box asking us to include it, and you can change your mind at any time. We never publish your email address, your phone number, your province as an individual, whether you are under 18, guardian details, or how your membership was confirmed.

Why we hold it. To run the association: keeping the register the constitution requires, giving notice of meetings, and administering membership. For that core purpose we rely on our legitimate interests as the national body for the game rather than on your consent — consent would be the wrong basis for a record that has to exist for as long as you are a member. Consent is the basis for the optional extras: publishing your name, the newsletter, and anything concerning a member under 18. You can withdraw any of those without affecting your membership. Photographs of adult members are covered by the Photographs section below, which rests on the same legitimate interest rather than on consent — the sign-up form lets you record an objection up front, and you can object at any time afterwards with the same effect.

Giving us this information is voluntary, but we cannot register you as a member without at least a name, a club and a working email address.

Children. We do not register anyone under 18 without a parent or legal guardian’s permission, and we hold guardian contact details only for that purpose. Photographs of children are covered separately, below.

Where it is kept. The register itself is held in Cape Town, on encrypted storage inside South Africa. Access is restricted to the office-bearers responsible for administering it. The published figures are a separate file, served from this website like any other page and so held outside the country; it contains only the totals and the names of members who asked to be listed.

How long we keep it. A sign-up that is never confirmed by email is deleted automatically after seven days. If your membership lapses, we delete your contact details, the under-18 flag and any guardian details two years later. We keep a minimal historical record — your name, your club and the years you were a member — as an association record.

Seeing, correcting or deleting your details. Mail membership@sagoclubs.co.za. You can ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it — at any time, and without giving a reason. If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa.

Photographs

We publish photographs from tournaments, club meetings and other SAGA events, so that members can look back on them and so that people considering the game can see what it looks like to play. Photographs appear on club and event pages and in the photo archive.

Asking us to take a photograph down. If you appear in a photograph on this site and would rather not, tell the event organiser or mail the webmaster and we will remove it. You do not need to give a reason, and you do not need to be a SAGA member to ask. The same applies if you would prefer not to be photographed at an event at all — let the organiser know on the day.

Children. We publish a photograph in which a person under 18 is recognisable only with the permission of their parent or legal guardian. That permission can be withdrawn at any time, by the same route as above.

What we do with the files. We remove embedded metadata — including EXIF GPS coordinates, which would otherwise reveal where a photograph was taken — before publishing. We do not tag, label or name individuals in photographs. The photo archive is marked so that search engines do not index it, and we keep roughly the last four years of event photographs.

Where the files are kept. This website and its images are hosted on servers outside South Africa.

We publish these photographs in SAGA’s legitimate interest as the national body for the game — reporting on our own events and promoting Go in South Africa — rather than on the basis of consent, except for photographs of children as described above. If you have a question about how we handle this, the webmaster address above is the place to raise it.

Site contributors

SAGA members can make contributions to the site. If this interests you, please get in touch so that the process can be explained. We will also discuss the site’s use of cookies and any other details relevant.

If you have an account on this site to make contribution, 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.

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.