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1Who we are
The website afrimets.org is operated by the Intra-Africa Metrology System (AFRIMETS) through its Secretariat, which is hosted by the National Metrology Institute of South Africa (NMISA) at the CSIR Campus in Pretoria. For the purposes of data protection law, AFRIMETS, acting through its Secretariat, is responsible for the personal information described in this policy.
You can contact the Secretariat about this policy through the contact form on the website or at the email address shown on the Contact Us page.
2What this policy covers
This policy applies to the public website and the services offered through it: browsing, the contact form, the newsletter, and the material you send us. It does not cover the websites of member institutions, partners or other organisations that we link to; they have their own policies.
3Information you give us
Contact form: your full name, email address, telephone number, the subject and the text of your message. We also record the page the message was sent from, the date and time, and the internet address (IP address) and browser of the device used, which helps us tell genuine messages from automated ones.
Newsletter: the email address you enter to subscribe.
Other correspondence: anything you choose to send us, such as a story, a document or a photograph for publication, together with your contact details.
Please do not send us sensitive information, such as health or financial details, unless we have asked for it for a specific purpose.
4Information collected automatically
Like most websites, our servers keep technical logs of visits: the pages requested, the date and time, the IP address, the browser and operating system, and the page that referred you. We use these logs to keep the website secure, to diagnose problems and to understand how the website is used in aggregate.
The website sets a session cookie so that pages work correctly and forms are protected against misuse. See the section on cookies below.
5Why we use personal information
To answer your enquiry and, where appropriate, to pass it to the member institution, committee or partner best placed to reply.
To send you the newsletter you asked for, until you unsubscribe.
To publish material you have sent us for publication, with your agreement.
To keep the website secure, prevent abuse and investigate problems.
To understand, in aggregate, how the website is used, so that we can improve it.
To meet legal obligations and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
We rely on your consent for the newsletter and for publishing what you send us, on our legitimate interest in running a secure and useful website for the technical logs and statistics, and on the need to respond to you for enquiries. We do not sell personal information and we do not use it for automated decisions about you.
6Cookies and similar technologies
Necessary cookies: a session cookie and a security token cookie are needed for the website to work, for example to protect forms against forged submissions. They do not identify you by name and expire after a short period of inactivity or when the session ends.
Analytics: the Secretariat may switch on Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager or a Facebook pixel to measure how the website is used. When these are on, the relevant provider sets its own cookies and processes the data under its own policy. They are not used to show you advertising on our website.
You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings. Blocking the necessary cookies will stop the contact form from working.
7Content embedded from other services
Some pages show content hosted by other services: the map on the Contact Us page comes from Google Maps, videos are played from YouTube or Vimeo in their privacy-enhanced mode, and the website's fonts are loaded from Google Fonts. When such content is displayed, your browser connects to that service, which may set its own cookies and collect your IP address. Those services are governed by their own privacy policies.
8Who sees your information
Secretariat staff and the administrators who manage the website.
The AFRIMETS member institution, technical committee or partner organisation best placed to answer your enquiry, when you ask us something that falls to them.
Service providers who host the website and deliver email on our behalf. They act on our instructions and may not use personal information for their own purposes.
Public authorities, where the law requires it.
We do not sell, rent or trade personal information.
9International transfers
AFRIMETS has member institutions across Africa, and an enquiry may be passed to an institution in another country to be answered. Service providers may process information in countries other than yours. In each case we take reasonable steps so that the information is protected to a standard comparable to the one described in this policy.
10How long we keep it
Messages sent through the contact form are kept for as long as needed to deal with them and for a reasonable period afterwards, so that we can refer back to the correspondence.
Newsletter addresses are kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove them.
Technical logs are kept for a limited period for security and troubleshooting, and are then deleted or anonymised.
Material you sent for publication is kept for as long as it is published, together with the record of your agreement.
11How we protect it
The website is served over an encrypted connection. Access to the administration area is restricted to authorised users with individual accounts, and changes made there are recorded. Our hosting providers apply industry-standard technical and organisational security measures. No transmission over the internet is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we take reasonable steps to protect the information we hold.
12Your rights
You may ask us what personal information we hold about you and request a copy; ask us to correct or delete it; object to a particular use; and withdraw your consent, for example by unsubscribing from the newsletter, without affecting what was done before.
To exercise these rights, contact the Secretariat. We may ask you to confirm your identity before acting on a request, and we will respond within a reasonable time.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the data protection authority in your country. In South Africa, where the Secretariat is hosted, this is the Information Regulator under the Protection of Personal Information Act.
13Children
The website is intended for professionals, institutions and the general public, and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 18. If you believe a child has sent us personal information, contact the Secretariat and we will delete it.
14Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time, for example when the website gains a new feature or the law changes. The date at the top of the page shows when it was last changed. Significant changes will be announced on the website.
Questions about personal information, and requests to see, correct or delete it, can be sent to the AFRIMETS Secretariat through the contact form or by email.
Contact Us