Privacy Policy

Who we are

BD Group, Bluegum Road, Vereeniging, Gauteng, South Africa. Email consult@bdgroup.co.za, phone +27 087 057-1581. We are the responsible party for the personal information described below.

What we collect through the contact form

• Contact details — your name, company name, email address and phone number.
• Enquiry content — the service you selected and the message you wrote.
• A photo — the image file you capture or upload when submitting the form.
• Technical data — your IP address, browser user-agent string and the date and time of submission, kept for security and anti-abuse purposes.

Why the photo is required

A photo of your existing system, workspace, document or website lets our consultants assess your situation before the first call and quote accurately. Please do not include other people, identity documents, bank cards, passwords or any information you do not want us to hold. Photos are used only to assess and respond to your enquiry — never for marketing, advertising or publication, and never sold or shared with third parties for their own purposes.

How we store your information

• Form submissions are stored in our MySQL database using parameterised queries.
• Photos are stored in a dedicated uploads directory on our web server with randomised filenames, and the directory is configured to prevent server-side script execution.
• Uploads are validated by type and size, and only JPG, PNG and WEBP images are accepted.
• Access to submissions and photos is restricted to BD Group staff who need it to respond to your enquiry.
• A notification email is sent to our consultants and a confirmation email is sent to you.

How long we keep it

Enquiry records and photos are kept for 24 months from submission so that we can service follow-up questions and honour quoted pricing, after which they are deleted. Where an enquiry becomes a paid project, the related records are retained for the period required by South African tax and company law.

Legal basis

We process your information because you submitted it to us to request a service (consent and the performance of a prospective contract), and because we have a legitimate interest in preventing abuse of our website forms.

Your rights under POPIA

• Request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Ask us to correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Ask us to delete your enquiry and the photo you submitted.
• Object to further processing or withdraw your consent.
• Lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa.

To exercise any of these rights, email consult@bdgroup.co.za with your name and, where you have one, your enquiry reference number. We respond within 30 days.

Cookies and analytics

This website sets a single PHP session cookie, which is strictly necessary to protect the contact form against cross-site request forgery. It expires when you close your browser. We do not set advertising cookies. If web analytics are added in future, this policy will be updated before they go live.

Third parties

Your information is handled by our web hosting provider and our email delivery provider purely so that the website and its email notifications can operate. They act on our instructions and may not use your information for their own purposes.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The version in force is always the one published on this page, with the last-updated date shown at the top.

Contact us about your data