Symion (Pty) Ltd (“Rubicon”) is a private company with limited liability incorporated in accordance with the laws of the Republic of South Africa with registration number: 2014/239716/07. Rubicon, and its subsidiaries (collectively referred to as “we”, “us” or “our”) are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This Policy (together with our website terms and conditions any other documents referred to therein) describes how we collect and process your personally identifiable information (“Personal Information").
Please do not provide us with any Personal Information if you do not agree with the terms of this Policy. Except in the circumstances indicated in this Policy relating to our collection of special Personal Information, we encourage you not to provide any special Personal Information to us.
Your provision of information to us is voluntary, although if you do not provide certain information to us you may not be able to engage effectively with us. By submitting your information to us, you agree and consent to our processing and transfer of your information in accordance with this Policy. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your information is treated securely and in accordance with this Policy.
Rubicon is a supplier and provider of sustainability technology and renewable energy products, software and related services.
Protecting your information is important to us and we would like to explain why we collect, store and use your information and assure you that we will keep your information confidential. We will only share your Personal Information when legally required to do so, if we need to do so in order to fulfil our agreement with you or you have given us your consent to do so.
The physical address of our head office is at 1B Hansen Close, Richmond Park, Cape Town, 7441, South Africa.
As you interact with us, you will likely provide information directly to us. We may collect information when you purchase product from us as an over-counter sale, apply for a customer account with us, are established on our systems as a supplier, customer or vendor, use or register to use our website at https://group.rubiconsa.com/ and other group websites, and/or our e-commerce portals, customer portals or design portals located thereon (collectively, the “Website”), use or interact with our social media platforms, apply for employment with us, complete online assessments or surveys or contact us via mail, telephone, email, the Website or electronic forms and otherwise through your business dealings with us. We may also collect information about you from personal or trade references that you have identified to us.
We may collect the following information about you:
as applicable, your name, trading name, registration number, ID number, VAT number, business details, address, contact details, bank details, education, qualifications, employment history, references and other information you provide to us;
certain special personal information such as gender and race which you provide to us when applying for employment with us;
details of your orders and transactions with us;
information contained in correspondence between us;
information that you provide when filling in forms on the Website or when responding to surveys;
details of your visits to the Website (including but not limited to login credentials, traffic data, IP address, location data, browser type, “visitor action pixels” from Facebook and other third-party tracking technologies, information collected via cookies and server logs); and
your image may be captured on CCTV cameras if you attend at our premises.
We use a variety of security measures to protect your data. We maintain physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to help prevent unauthorized access to and improper use of personally identifiable information. However, no website or electronic data can ever be completely secure, but we are always working to maintain up-to-date and appropriate security mechanisms. Additionally, some information that we collect from you is stored in locked physical storage, on our secure servers or, in the case of supplier and vendor bank details, on our third-party banking platform.
We have reasonable and appropriate security measures in place to protect the information we hold and to prevent unlawful processing, unauthorised access and accidental loss, destruction or damage. The Website uses secure socket layer (SSL) for authentication, encryption and private communications.
Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of the Website, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet or email is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your information, we cannot guarantee the security of your information transmitted via the Website or email; any such transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.
We retain your information for as long as needed or permitted considering the purposes for which it was obtained. The criteria used to determine our retention periods include but are not limited to the length of time we have an ongoing relationship with you and our legal obligations and legitimate business interests.
We use information held about you in the following ways, where applicable:
Please also note that we also receive and store standard information from you of a non-identifiable nature, which is information which is received when you interact with the Website regarding your internet connection and online services. We may use such information to track movements on the Website and improve the Website and online services. Such information will include the URL you came from, IP address, domain type, browser type, country your device is located and any search terms you entered on our website. This information will not identify you unless combined with Personal Information and we do not use Personal Information in this process.
Furthermore, we do not knowingly collect Personal Information of children without the consent of a parent or guardian.
We generally do not disclose your information to third parties, however, it may be necessary from time to time to make your information available to other members of our group and to third parties (such as legal and regulatory authorities, accountants, auditors, lawyers, partner credit providers and other professional advisers, sub-contractors (for example for the outsourcing of the payroll function) or providers of products and services).
We will only disclose your information to our partner credit providers if you have applied for financing and/or consented thereto in writing, and shall be processed in terms of the provisions of POPIA.
We may, from time to time, use your information as a trade reference for purposes of completing applications with our suppliers for the supply of product. We will only disclose such information as may be necessary for such purpose.
To the extent that you are a juristic person and have applied for a credit facility with us, we advise that your information supplied to us in the context of the relevant credit application, shall be shared with Credit Guarantee Insurance Corporation of Africa Limited ("CGIC"), a licensed non-life insurer, in terms of our trade-credit insurance policy with them. CGIC will process this personal information for underwriting, policy administration, claims management and related insurance purposes. For further information about how CGIC processes your personal information please refer to their Privacy Notice, available under the Privacy section on their website www.creditguarantee.co.za.
If we decide to or are required to transfer your information to third parties, we will do so only once written contracts are in place to ensure the security of your information and we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.
We may disclose your information to the extent necessary to enforce our Terms and Conditions of Sale or any agreement with you, to enforce our Website Terms, to comply with a legal obligation or to protect the rights, property or safety of us or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
We use Google Analytics to collect traffic statistics for the Website and this information is shared with Google. You can opt-out of Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. For more information, please visit the Google Privacy Terms.
You have the following rights in relation to the information we hold about you:
For your protection, we may only implement requests with respect to the information associated with the details you provide to us and we may need to verify your identity before implementing your request. We will respond to your request as required by applicable laws as soon as reasonably practicable.
Please note that we retain backup systems, which are essential to the operation of our business. If we are not able to delete residual copies from our systems or from our backup systems, your information will continue to be protected as required under this Policy.
We take all reasonable and appropriate measures to ensure that your Personal Information is safeguarded and secure. We have reasonable standards of technology and operational security in place to attempt to prevent loss or misuse of any Personal Information. Any of our authorised employees who are responsible for the maintenance of any special Personal Information as defined by the Protection of Personal Information Act (No. 4 of 2013) (hereinafter "POPIA") submitted by you are requested to maintain the confidentiality of such information, unless you have expressed to us otherwise.
Whenever we commission other organisations to provide support services to us, we will bind them to our privacy policies as far as they may be required to have access to our customers' personal information to perform such services. Our website may contain links to or from other sites. While we try to link only to sites that share our high standards and respect for privacy, we are not responsible for the content or the security or privacy practices employed by other sites. We recommend that you always read the privacy and security statements on such sites.
We will not disclose Personal information to anyone outside the organisation or organisations who provide services to us without your permission unless:
we are compelled to do so by law or in terms of a court order;
it is in the public interest to do so;
it is necessary to protect our rights.
However, no system is perfect unfortunately and we cannot guarantee absolute security despite our best efforts. In the event that there is a privacy breach, we will let you know unless we are obligated by law not to do so.
We may use cookies, which are small text files stored in a user’s browser, or web beacons, namely electronic images that allow this Website to count users who have accessed a particular page and to access certain cookies, to ensure that the Website is well managed and to facilitate improvement of the Website. Furthermore, we may use cookies to collect aggregate data and to track information on our systems and identify categories of users by items such as IP addresses, domains, browser types and pages visited from time to time.
Cookies are not computer programs and do not run on a computer like programs do. The cookies located on our website cannot gather information or function on their own. They cannot collect any personal information about you or your machine and cannot gather data or information about what you do on the Internet. Cookies merely enable us to provide a more valuable online experience to you. While you can set up your Internet browser to disable cookie technology, we do not recommend that you do this since some parts of this Website and our online services may not function properly, or at all.
Provided that you have agreed to this, we may use your personal or other information to send you information on new services or products that may be of interest to you and from time to time will email, telephone or SMS information to you about us, our products and services, or our partners and their products or services. If you do not wish to continue receiving this information you may contact us and we will remove you from our mailing list.
The principles set out in this Policy are also aimed at compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulations, to the extent applicable.
We will periodically review our privacy practices, which are subject to change. Any changes we may make to this Policy in the future will be posted on: https://group.rubiconsa.com/policies/privacy-policy or any other webpage designated by us from time to time for the publication of this Policy .
For the purpose of POPIA, the responsible person is Rubicon. Please contact our Information Officer at privacy@rubiconsa.com if you have questions regarding this Policy or our privacy practices, if you would like to review, correct, update or delete the information we hold about you, if you would like to object to or withdraw your consent to our use of your information or if you would like to opt-out of marketing communications.
If you wish to report a complaint regarding your Personal Information that we hold if you are unhappy that we have not addressed your concerns satisfactorily, you can contact the Information Regulator at:
e-mail: inforeg@justice.gov.za
