How we handle personal information.
We build systems that touch other people’s data for a living. It would be strange to be vague about our own.
Last updated 9 September 2026
This notice explains what personal information 5th Gen Automation collects, why we collect it, and what you can ask us to do about it. It is written to the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA).
Who we are
5th Gen Automate (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2026/625794/07, trading as 5th Gen Automation, is an automation and AI enablement practice with its registered office at 76 Kloof Road, Sea Point, Cape Town, Western Cape, 8005. We are the responsible party for the information described on this page.
Our Information Officer is Aidan Snyman, reachable at aidan@5thgenautomate.com.
Two different roles
It matters which one we are in, because your rights differ.
- Our own contacts. When you enquire, book a call or email us, we decide how that information is used. We are the responsible party and this notice governs it.
- Our clients' data. When we build or run a system for a client, we process their customers' information on their instruction only. They are the responsible party; we are the operator. In those engagements we sign a written operator agreement before anything goes live, and we do not use that information for any purpose of our own.
What we collect
- When you contact us: your name, email address, phone number, business name, and whatever you choose to tell us about your business.
- When you book a call: the same details, taken through Calendly, plus the time you selected.
- When you visit this site: standard technical information your browser sends, such as approximate location and device type. We do not run advertising trackers or sell traffic data.
- During an engagement: access to the systems and documents you give us in order to do the work, and notes on how your business runs.
Why we collect it
- To answer you, quote, and do work you have asked for.
- To meet obligations under a contract with you, and to keep the records tax and company law require.
- To send you occasional information about our work, where you have agreed to it. Every such message has an unsubscribe option and we honour it.
We do not sell personal information. We do not share it with anyone for their own marketing.
Who else sees it
We use a small number of established service providers to run our own business — email and calendar hosting, scheduling, automation infrastructure, website analytics, and AI model providers. They process information on our instruction, under their own security obligations, and only to the extent the work requires.
Some of these providers process information outside South Africa. Where that happens, we rely on providers whose contractual terms require a level of protection comparable to POPIA, as section 72 requires.
We will disclose information where the law requires it. We will not do so voluntarily.
Artificial intelligence, specifically
We use AI models as part of how we build and run systems. Two commitments about that:
- Every system we build keeps a person in the decision seat. Nothing we build decides somebody’s money, rights or benefits on its own.
- We use business-tier services whose terms do not permit your information to be used to train public models.
How long we keep it
Enquiries that do not become work are kept for up to two years and then deleted. Client records are kept for the length of the engagement and afterwards for the period required by tax and company law, currently five years. Anything we no longer need a reason to hold, we delete.
How we protect it
- Each client’s automations run in a workspace kept separate from every other client.
- Access is limited to the two of us and to the specific systems a job requires.
- Accounts are protected with multi-factor authentication.
- We collect the minimum the job needs. Less information held is less information at risk.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever affected your information, we would notify you and the Information Regulator as section 22 requires.
Your rights
Under POPIA you may ask us to:
- tell you what information we hold about you;
- correct anything that is wrong or out of date;
- delete information we no longer have grounds to keep;
- stop sending you marketing, at any time;
- object to how we are processing your information.
Email aidan@5thgenautomate.com and we will respond within 30 days. There is no charge for a reasonable request.
If we get it wrong. Tell us first and we will try to fix it. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa at inforegulator.org.za or complaints.IR@justice.gov.za.
Cookies and analytics
This site uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people read. It tells us how many people came, roughly which part of the world they came from, and what they clicked. It does not tell us who you are.
To do that it stores a small file called a cookie in your browser, which is what lets it tell a returning visitor from a new one. Your IP address is used to work out the approximate location and is not stored by Google Analytics.
We have not switched on any advertising or cross-site tracking features. This site carries no advertising cookies of any kind, and we do not build profiles of visitors or pass anything to advertisers.
Google processes this information outside South Africa, on the basis set out under Who else sees it. We have accepted Google’s Data Processing Terms for this analytics account.
If you would rather not be counted, most browsers can block cookies for a single site, and Google publishes an opt-out add-on at tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Nothing on this site stops working if you do.
Changes
If this notice changes materially, we will update the date at the top and, where the change affects an active client, tell them directly.