South Africa Privacy Centre
Customer Service Privacy Notice
Introduction
This privacy notice provides information about how we use and share personal information relating to consumers who contact us with an enquiry, request or complaint. You can find more detailed information at the TransUnion Privacy Centre or in other privacy information you may have received.
In Brief
When you contact us with a request, complaint or enquiry, we will use your personal information in order to help us to respond to you.
Sometimes this will mean sharing personal information with third parties. For example, if you dispute the accuracy of information on your credit report, we may need to contact the organisation who provided us with that information to check whether it is correct.
This notice covers the following topics:
- Who we are and how to contact us
- How we use personal information
- The kinds of personal information we use and where we get personal information
- How long we keep personal information
- Our legal basis for handling personal information
- Who we share personal information with
- Where we store and send personal information
- Your rights concerning your personal information
- Where to lodge a complaint
1. Who we are and how to contact us
Information for Good®
We are in an era of rapid digital transformation where consumers demand more access to seamless, personalised products and services online. But the currency of personal information that fuels this platform economic boom poses threats to individuals and endangers corporate security.
Now more than ever — and likely more so in the future — consumers and corporates need new levels of trust and transparency.
As a global information and insights company, TransUnion seeks to make trust possible. We do this by curating an accurate and comprehensive picture of each consumer so they are safely and reliably represented in the marketplace. This enables businesses and consumers to transact with confidence and achieve great things. We call this Information for Good.
We are a group of companies with registered offices at TransUnion, 10th Floor, 11 Alice Lane, Sandton, Johannesburg, 2196. Although we are part of a larger group, this notice covers only the activities of TransUnion companies within the Republic of South Africa.
Contact details
Contact us about personal information issues, including the contents of this notice via:
- Post: PO Box 4522 Johannesburg 2000
- Telephone: Contact Centre: 0861 482 482
- Email: TUAPrivacy@transunion.com
2. How we use personal information
Enquiries
We use your personal information to deal with any issue or complaint you have raised (which we refer to as an “enquiry”). This might include contacting you for more information or tell you the outcome of your enquiry. Typical enquiries include:
- Requests for access to personal information, to challenge the accuracy of personal information, or to request the erasure of personal information
- Support requests for our consumer products
- Complaints of any nature
- General enquiries
Identity verification
When you contact us, we may need to verify your identity to ensure we do not provide personal information to unauthorised parties.
Example: identity verification
If someone contacts us and asks us for a copy of your credit report, we will check that is you (or someone authorised by you) asking for it. We may ask for evidence of identity such as copies of your driving license or a bank statement.
It is important to do this because the information in your credit report is valuable and could be used to impersonate you if it were to fall into the wrong hands.
Feedback
We may ask you to provide us with feedback or to leave a review about the service you received. Your feedback helps us to improve our services.
Products and services
We use aggregated statistics about enquiries, requests and complaints to help manage our services and identify potential problems. Some enquiries lead to changes to the personal information we use in our products and services.
Constant improvement
We use information from complaints and requests to help understand what went wrong, fix any problems, and improve how we deal with similar issues.
Legal and regulatory purposes
We may use personal information for legal and regulatory purposes. This might include responding to complaints or enquiries from you or a regulator about how we have handled your enquiry or used your personal information.
3. The kinds of personal information we use and where we get personal information
We obtain and use information from various sources summarised in the following table:
Type of Information | Description | Source |
Basic contact information. | Name, email address and job title | You provide this information when you make an enquiry or when we subsequently request it. |
Your enquiry. | Any enquiry you make | |
Proof of identity or authority and other supporting documentation. | To prove your identity. If you enquire on someone else’s behalf, we may ask for proof of authority, such as a power of attorney. Sometimes we may require additional supporting documentation. | |
Information gathered in dealing with your enquiry. | Dealing with an enquiry involves investigating the circumstances. This type of information depends on the enquiry. | Internal records and external organisations, such as clients and suppliers. |
Our response and other correspondence. | Our response to and other correspondence relating to your enquiry. | We produce this ourselves. |
Website usage. | If you access or submit information through our website, we record information such as IP address, operating system and browser type. | We gather this through the website. |
4. How long we keep personal information
Simply put, we keep personal information for as long as necessary. More technically, we retain it to fulfil the purpose(s) of its provision, to comply with applicable laws, and for as long as your consent to such purpose(s) remains valid after termination of our relationship.
You are free to choose whether you give us your personal information. However, if you do not provide the information we need, this may limit our ability to help.
5. Our legal basis for handling personal information
Legitimate interests
The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) allows personal information usage where necessary for legitimate purposes without undue adverse impact. We base most of our processing activities on the legitimate interests listed below.
Interest | Explanation |
Security | To keep your personal information secure |
Reputation and service improvement | Manage enquiries quickly and efficiently to build our business reputation |
Other legal bases
Legal - Regulators, government bodies and courts can order us to provide information and we may have to comply.
6. Who we share personal information with
Our group of companies
As stated, we share personal information among TransUnion RSA companies where appropriate. We have set out a list of current such companies below.
Group Company | Physical Address |
TransUnion Africa Holdings (Pty) Ltd | TransUnion |
TransUnion Credit Bureau (Pty) Ltd | |
TransUnion Africa (Pty) Ltd | |
TransUnion Analytic and Decision Services (Pty) Ltd | |
TransUnion Auto Information Solutions (Pty) Ltd |
Service providers
Our clients and we might provide information to third parties that help us achieve the purposes described above.
Data suppliers and other third parties
If your enquiry is about data supplied to us by third parties, we might provide them with your personal information to help manage your enquiry. For example, if you dispute the accuracy of an entry on your credit file, we may contact the provider of that information to check whether its validity.
These service providers cannot use your information for their purposes or on behalf of other organisations unless you agree otherwise.
7. Where we store and send personal information
We sometimes make use of Service Providers that are situated outside of South Africa, e.g. India, UK and US. We will not transfer personal information to a country lacking laws that provide an adequate level of information protection — unless we have an agreement with the recipient requiring measures that offer a similar level of protection as POPIA in South Africa.
8. Your rights concerning personal information
We outline your rights regarding the personal information we hold about you below.
Access: You can access all information that we hold about you by contacting us through TUAPrivacy@transunion.com
Correction/Destruction/Deletion: If the information we hold about you is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete, misleading or obtained unlawfully, you have a right to ask us to correct it or delete it.
Objection to processing: You may object (on reasonable grounds) to processing your personal information unless legislation provides for such processing.
Objection to direct marketing: You may object to us using your personal information for direct marketing, and if you do, we will stop.
9. Where to lodge a complaint
We strive to deliver the highest levels of customer service. However, if you are ever unhappy with us, please contact us so we can investigate.
- Location: 10th Floor, 11 Alice Lane, Sandton, 2196
- Postal Address: PO Box 4522, Johannesburg, 2000
- Telephone: 0861 482 482
You can also contact our Information Officer or Deputy Information Officer at TUAPrivacy@transunion.com
You may complain to the Information Regulator:
- Physical Address: Woodmead North Office Park, 54 Maxwell Drive, Woodmead, Johannesburg
- Postal Address: P.O. Box 31533, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 2017
- Email: POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za.
- Site: www.inforegulator.org.za