Privacy Policy

DinnerMatch is a South African platform that matches members into small groups and books them a table at a restaurant. We operate from Cape Town.

We are the responsible party for your personal information under the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA). Our Information Officer can be reached at hello@dinnermatch.co.za, and that is also the address for every request described in this policy.

We only ask for what the matching and the booking actually need. Depending on how far you get through signing up, we may hold:

Your account

Your name, email address and a hashed password. If you sign in with Google we receive your name, email address and the profile picture URL on your Google account instead of a password.

Your mobile number

Stored in international format. We ask for it during sign-up so we can reach you about your own dinner. Nobody at your table ever sees it.

About you

Your date of birth, and — where you choose to tell us — your gender, the industry you work in, your relationship status and your nationality.

What you want from a dinner

The city and the areas you are willing to travel to, the languages you speak, the most you want to spend on a meal, and your dietary requirements.

Your quiz answers

The personality questions you answer, stored one answer per question. These are the main input into who you are seated with.

Your dinners

Which events you are interested in, which you have confirmed, which group you were placed in and which restaurant that group was given.

What you say afterwards

Your rating of the evening, the venue and the group, anything you write in the comment fields, and the private rating or report you give a person at your table.

Messages

Messages you send in a DinnerMatch chat channel, and a record of the email and WhatsApp messages we send you — including delivery failures.

Your subscription

Your plan, its billing period, and the amount, currency and reference of each payment. We never see or store your card number.

Technical information

The IP address and browser or device your session was created from, and how you move around the site.

There is no way to upload a profile photo, so unless you signed in with Google we hold no picture of you.

Almost all of it comes from you: the quiz, sign-up, your settings and the feedback form after a dinner. The rest is either generated by using the site, sent to us by Google when you sign in with it, sent to us by our payment provider when a payment succeeds or fails, or written about you by another member when they rate the table.

POPIA requires us to have a justification for each use, not just a purpose. Ours are:

To run the service you signed up for

Matching you into a group, choosing and arranging a table, telling you where and when to be, taking your subscription payment and supporting you when something goes wrong. This is necessary to perform our agreement with you.

To keep tables safe and civil

Reviewing reports members make about each other, and acting on them. This is our legitimate interest, and other members'.

To improve the matching and the product

Using your feedback and aggregate patterns to seat better tables and to decide what to build. Our legitimate interest.

To send you marketing

News and offers by email, and dinner messages on WhatsApp. Both are separate opt-ins and both can be switched off without affecting your membership.

To meet our legal obligations

Keeping the financial records that tax and company law require us to keep.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it to make automated decisions with legal consequences for you. Group matching is automated, but a person can and does adjust it.

We use other companies to run the platform. Each may only process your information on our instructions, and none of them may use it for their own purposes:

Paystack

Takes card payments and runs the recurring subscription. Your card details are entered on their systems, not ours.

Payfast

Used only for subscriptions taken out on our previous platform, so those can still be cancelled and still report their charges.

Vercel and Neon

Host the website and the database, in the European Union.

SendGrid

Sends our email and reports whether it arrived.

Meta (WhatsApp Business Platform)

Delivers WhatsApp messages, if you have opted in. Meta receives your mobile number in order to deliver them.

PostHog

Product analytics, on their European servers. The only thing we attach to your analytics profile is your email address. Session recording is switched off.

Sentry

Error monitoring, so we hear about a crash. It receives your account id and email address alongside the technical detail of the error. Session replay is switched off.

Google

Only if you choose to sign in with Google.

Restaurants

A restaurant is told a first name and a headcount so the table is held. Nothing else about you goes to a venue.

Our AI features receive only de-identified group summaries — an age range, a spread of interests, a language mix. No name, contact detail or per-person record is ever sent to an AI provider.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim. If our business is ever sold or restructured, member information may transfer with it, and this policy continues to apply to it.

Our database and servers are in the European Union, and several of the providers listed above are in the United States. That means your information leaves South Africa.

POPIA allows this where the receiving party is bound by rules that protect your information to a comparable standard. Each of our providers is engaged under a data processing agreement that commits them to exactly that.

We set a small number of cookies:

Session cookie

Keeps you signed in. The site does not work without it.

Interface preference

Remembers a layout choice, such as whether a sidebar is open. Kept for a week.

Analytics cookies

Set by PostHog to recognise a returning browser and group page views into a visit.

We do not run advertising cookies or third-party ad pixels. We do not currently ask for cookie consent before analytics loads, so if you would rather not be counted, block or delete cookies for this site in your browser settings — the rest of the site will keep working.

Our analytics and error reporting are served through our own domain so that they are not blocked in transit. They are still the third parties named above, even though the requests look like ours.

Your account and profile

For as long as you have an account, and afterwards only where a reason below applies.

Payment records

Five years from the end of the tax year they fall in, because financial law requires it.

Dinner history and feedback

Kept while it is useful for matching. Feedback you wrote about a table stays attached to the event rather than to you.

Safety reports

Kept as long as we may need them to protect other members, which may be longer than your membership.

Message logs

Delivery records for email and WhatsApp are kept for two years.

Your WhatsApp preference

If you opt out we keep the record of the preference itself, so that we have proof we stopped. We do not keep messaging you.

Everything travels over an encrypted connection. Passwords are stored hashed, never in a form we can read. Access to member data is limited to the people who run the platform, and card details never touch our systems.

A member of our team can sign in as you in order to resolve a support problem. That is recorded against the session, so there is always a trail of when it happened.

No system is perfectly secure. Please use a password you have not used elsewhere, and sign out on a shared device. If a breach ever puts your information at real risk, we will tell you and the Information Regulator, as POPIA requires.

In your account settings you can change the areas you will travel to, your languages, your budget ceiling and your dietary requirements, and switch marketing email and WhatsApp messages on or off. The switches take effect immediately.

Every marketing email also carries an unsubscribe link that works without signing in. Opting out of marketing does not stop the messages about a dinner you have already booked.

Under POPIA you may ask us to:

• confirm whether we hold information about you, and give you a copy of it
• correct or complete anything that is wrong or out of date
• delete information we no longer have a reason to keep, and close your account
• stop processing your information for a particular purpose, or withdraw a consent you gave
• object to processing we justify by our legitimate interest

There is no self-service button for these yet, so email hello@dinnermatch.co.za and we will handle it by hand. We will confirm your identity first, and respond within a reasonable period. Where we have to keep something — a payment record, or a safety report — we will tell you what and why.

If you are not satisfied with how we handled it, you may complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa.

DinnerMatch is for adults. We do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 18, and we reject a date of birth that puts you under 18. If you believe a child has given us their information, tell us and we will remove it.

When this policy changes we update the date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects what we do with your information, we will email you before it takes effect.

Any question about this policy, and any request about your own information, goes to hello@dinnermatch.co.za. A person reads it.