← Hellobru

Privacy Policy

Effective date: 24 October 2026
Last updated: 24 October 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Hellobru (“we”, “us”, “our”) collects, uses, and shares personal information when you use our website and our WhatsApp bookkeeping product for South African spaza shops and informal traders. We process personal information in line with South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) and applicable platform rules.

1. Who we are (responsible party / controller)

Hellobru is a Business / Productivity service: a WhatsApp bookkeeping and order-assistant product for traders. We are not a grocery store, food seller, or marketplace.

Hellobru (trading as Hellobru). For company registration details, contact us below.

Privacy contact email: [email protected]. Phone: +27 00 000 0000.

2. Who this product is for (children)

Hellobru is directed at businesses and adult traders. It is not directed at children under 18, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from under-18s for the product.

3. Personal information we collect

Depending on how you use Hellobru, we may collect:

4. Shop data vs end-customer details

Hellobru primarily processes the trader’s (shop’s) WhatsApp identity and the ledger or order information that shop submits. If a shop includes details about its own end-customers (for example a customer name or phone number in an order note), those details are provided by the shop for its bookkeeping. The shop remains responsible for its relationship with its end-customers and for having a lawful basis to share any such details with us for that purpose. Hellobru does not sell goods to those end-customers.

5. Why we process personal information (purposes)

We use personal information to:

Under POPIA we process personal information for these specific, explicitly defined purposes and do not use it for incompatible purposes. We do not use Hellobru to operate a grocery or food retail business.

6. Meta / WhatsApp and cross-border processing

Messaging is delivered on Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform. When you use WhatsApp to interact with Hellobru, Meta may process message-related data as the platform provider under Meta’s terms and policies. That processing may involve transfers to the United States and other countries where Meta operates. Hellobru remains the South African-facing responsible party for how we use shop data inside the Hellobru product.

7. Sharing and operators

We may share personal information with:

We do not sell personal information.

8. Cookies and site logs

The Hellobru marketing site is a static site. We use essential hosting and security logs only (for example IP address, request time, and user-agent) as generated by our host (Cloudflare) to deliver pages and protect the service. We do not currently use analytics or advertising cookies. If we add analytics or similar tools later, we will name them in this policy before or when they go live.

9. Retention

We keep personal information only for as long as needed for the purposes above, or as required by law. In practice, we retain shop-related records while the shop uses Hellobru and for a limited period afterwards, unless a longer period is required by law. When information is no longer needed, we delete or de-identify it where practicable.

10. Your rights (POPIA)

Subject to POPIA and applicable law, you may request access to personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct inaccurate information, and request deletion where applicable. You may also object to or query certain processing. To exercise these rights, use the contact in How to request deletion of your data or Contact us below. You may lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator (South Africa).

11. How to request deletion of your data

You can ask us to delete personal information we hold about you in connection with Hellobru. Meta’s App Dashboard may also link to this section (or to a dedicated /data-deletion page that repeats these steps) under User data deletion instructions.

  1. Email your request. Send an email to [email protected]. Use subject line: Hellobru data deletion request.
  2. Identify the account. Include the WhatsApp phone number used with Hellobru, and any other detail that helps us find your records (for example shop name).
  3. What we delete. We delete or de-identify Hellobru product records tied to that identity (for example ledger/order data and related messages we store), except information we must keep for legal, security, or dispute reasons.
  4. Turnaround. We aim to confirm receipt within a few business days and complete deletion requests as soon as reasonably practicable and within the timeframes allowed by POPIA, unless a longer period is required by law.
  5. Platform limits. Data held only inside WhatsApp or Meta under their products is subject to Meta’s own tools and policies; we will still clear what Hellobru controls.

Optional later: publish the same steps at https://hellobru.co.za/data-deletion and link it from this policy and from the Meta App Dashboard.

12. Contact us

Privacy requests: [email protected].

Business contact: Hellobru. Phone: +27 00 000 0000. Email: [email protected].

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The Last updated date at the top will change when we do. Continued use of the site or product after an update means you should review the revised policy.