privacy policy

effective date: 13 august 2026

This policy explains how Aware Movement (Pty) Ltd collects, uses, stores, and protects your personal information for The Aware System, in accordance with the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA) of South Africa.

1. Responsible Party and Information Officer

The responsible party is Aware Movement (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2025/500633/07.

The Information Officer is contactable at hello@theawaresystem.com. All requests relating to your personal information should be sent to this address.

2. Information We Collect and Its Source

• Waitlist email: if you submit your email address on theawaresystem.com, we collect that address, provided directly by you.
• Account information: when you sign up in the app, we collect your email address and a password, provided directly by you.
• User content: the observations, reflections, and conditions you enter into the Observe, Reflect, and Condition layers, provided directly by you and stored in your private account.

3. The Nature of User Content

The Aware System is not a medical or diagnostic tool. The entries you record are your own self-observations, not clinical health records, diagnoses, or assessments. We do not process your entries as health information, and we do not use them to infer, evaluate, or record any health condition. They exist only as your private log, accessible to you.

4. Purpose of Collection

• The waitlist email is used solely to send you one notification when the app launches.
• Account information is used to create, secure, and manage your account.
• User content is used only to operate the app and let you track your own history over time.

We do not process your information for any purpose beyond those stated above.

5. Whether Provision Is Voluntary, and the Consequences

Providing your personal information is voluntary. No law requires you to provide it. If you do not provide a waitlist email, you will not receive the launch notification. If you do not provide account details, you will not be able to create or use an account.

6. Legal Basis and How Consent Is Given

We process your personal information on the basis of your consent. For the waitlist, submitting your email address through the form on theawaresystem.com is the act of consent, and the submission is recorded with a date and time stamp as a record of that consent. You may withdraw your consent at any time by emailing the Information Officer, after which we will stop processing and delete the relevant information, subject to any retention we are lawfully required to keep.

7. Operators and Recipients

We use trusted service providers, known under POPIA as operators, who process personal information on our behalf and under a duty of confidentiality: Netlify for website hosting and waitlist capture, Supabase for authentication and secure data storage, Google Workspace for email, and Anthropic as the artificial intelligence provider for the app's AI features. We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for marketing or advertising.

Where you choose to use an AI feature, the text of that entry is sent to Anthropic solely to generate the response returned to you. Anthropic does not use content submitted through its commercial API to train its models. AI features are optional, and entries you do not submit to them are never sent to any AI provider.

8. Cross-Border Transfer

Some of our operators may store or process personal information on servers located outside South Africa. Where this occurs, we take reasonable steps to ensure the information receives a level of protection comparable to that required by Section 72 of POPIA.

9. Data Security

We use industry-standard authentication through Supabase and apply reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information against loss, unauthorised access, and misuse.

10. Breach Notification

If your personal information is compromised through unauthorised access or disclosure, we will notify the Information Regulator and you, as the affected data subject, as soon as reasonably possible, in accordance with Section 22 of POPIA.

11. Retention and Withdrawal

Waitlist email addresses are held only until the app launches and the launch notification has been sent, after which they are deleted unless you have separately created an account. You may withdraw from the waitlist and have your address deleted at any time before then by emailing the Information Officer at hello@theawaresystem.com. Account information and user content are retained while your account is active, and are deleted when you delete your account or request deletion.

12. No Advertising

We will never display third-party advertising, and we will never use your personal content to manipulate or convert behaviour.

13. Your Rights Under POPIA

As a data subject, you have the right to be notified about the collection of your information, to access the personal information we hold about you, to request its correction or deletion, to object to its processing, and to withdraw your consent at any time. To exercise any of these rights, email the Information Officer at hello@theawaresystem.com.

14. Lodging a Complaint

If you believe your personal information has been handled unlawfully, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa:

15. Relationship to the Terms of Service

This policy forms part of, and should be read together with, our Terms of Service.

16. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. For material changes to the purpose or legal basis of processing, we will notify you by email where we hold your address. Your continued use of the service constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.