How we protect you

Before anyone can list a property or send a message on Privately, they complete identity verification through Secure Citizen, an accredited third-party verification provider — not something we built or self-certify. It matches a live facial scan against Department of Home Affairs records and confirms the person is who their ID says they are.

What we store: a one-way, peppered cryptographic hash of the ID number (an HMAC, keyed with a secret we hold — not the ID number itself) so the same person cannot verify multiple accounts, and the Home Affairs-confirmed legal name, which is what shows on a verified badge.

What we deliberately don’t store: the plaintext ID number, the ID document photo, or the facial scan image. Those are stripped out of the verification result before anything is written to our database — they exist only for the moment the check runs. If verification fails twice, the account is locked from retrying and moved to manual review rather than given unlimited attempts against the same identity.

An asking price is one person’s number. On Privately, a published listing also carries an automated valuation from Lightstone — an independent property-data company neither we nor the seller control — built from actual registered sales and property records, not from anything the seller typed in. Where a match exists, buyers can see it alongside the asking price, right on the listing.

We don’t treat that match as automatically correct. The listing address is checked against the address Lightstone returns — street number, street name, suburb and city — and flagged with a confidence rating, because in a sectional-title complex the unit next door can be a single digit away in Lightstone’s own records. Sellers can also purchase a fuller Lightstone report with comparable sales and transfer history. A newly registered development may simply have no Lightstone history yet — we say so rather than inventing a number.

South African law requires sellers to disclose known defects, and that requirement is built into the listing flow itself, not left to an optional afterthought. A seller completes a structured disclosure form — roof condition, electrical compliance, foundation and structural issues, and known defects generally — as part of listing a property, and it carries a warning that failure to disclose known defects can create legal liability after transfer. That is the law creating the incentive to be honest, not a Privately feature.

A seller’s phone number and email are not published on a listing and are not handed out to every enquiry. A first conversation happens through in-app messaging; the seller decides if and when to share direct contact details with a specific buyer. That keeps a first point of contact private by default, rather than public the moment a listing goes live.

Privately is never in the money chain. A buyer’s deposit and the purchase price are paid into the conveyancing attorney’s trust account — a separately held, independently audited bank account regulated under the Legal Practice Act and backed by the Legal Practitioners’ Fidelity Fund — never to the seller directly, and never through Privately. Funds are released to the seller only once transfer registers at the Deeds Office. This is true of every registered property sale in South Africa, agent or no agent, platform or no platform.