Privacy Policy

Getadoc is operated by GetaDoc (Pty) Ltd, which is the responsible party for the personal information described here. We process it in line with the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (“POPIA”). Questions, access requests and deletion requests all reach us at hello@getadoc.co.za.

If you are a patient or visitor

You can search the directory and read profiles, articles and reviews without giving us anything.

• Enquiries and appointment requests. The name, email address, phone number and message you enter. We use them to pass your enquiry to the practice you chose, and we send that practice a notification containing them. Do not include clinical detail you would not want emailed — an enquiry is a message, not a consultation.
• Reviews. Your name (or the display name you give), your rating and your review text, which are published on the practitioner’s profile. Your email address, if given, is used for moderation and is not published.
• Technical information. Standard request data, plus our own anonymous counts of page and profile views. We use a bot check (Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise) on forms to stop automated abuse; that check is subject to Google’s privacy policy.
• Analytics cookies. We use Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to understand how the site is used — which pages people reach, and how they move through them. These set cookies in your browser and send Google your IP address, the pages you view and a randomly generated identifier for your browser. We do not use them to identify you by name, we do not send Google anything you type into an enquiry, review or the Symptom Guide, and we do not use them for advertising. You can opt out with Google’s browser add-on, or by blocking cookies for this site — the directory works either way.

If you are a practitioner

Practitioner listings were created from publicly available professional information. When you claim or create a profile we also collect the following, and we keep the two kinds apart:

• Published on your profile: your name, specialty, practice name, practice phone, practice email, practice address and hours, your biography, qualifications and education, and any logo or photos you upload. This is the information patients see.
• Never published — how we contact you: your sign-in email address and your personal cellphone number. We use these to administer your account, review your profile or claim, answer support questions and deal with billing. They are visible only to Getadoc staff and are not shown on your public profile, in search results or in our structured data.
• Registration details. Your HPCSA (or other council) registration number, used to verify that you are registered to practise. Verification status is shown publicly; the number itself is not.
• Billing. If you subscribe, we keep a record of payments, the plan and the periods they cover, so we can issue tax invoices. We never see or store your card details — those are handled by Payfast on their own platform.

Who we share it with

We do not sell personal information. We share it only with the practice you enquired with, and with the service providers who run the platform on our behalf: Cloudflare (hosting and storage), Payfast (payments), Google (the reCAPTCHA bot check, and Tag Manager and Analytics as described above), Anthropic (the Symptom Guide’s AI model), and our email delivery provider. Each processes it on our instructions. Google and Anthropic process it outside South Africa. We may also disclose information where the law requires it.

How long we keep it

Enquiries are kept while they are useful to the practice and to us for support, and are deleted on request. Published reviews stay until you or we remove them. Practitioner accounts and profiles are kept while the listing is live; if you ask us to remove your listing we delete it. Payment and invoice records are kept for five years, as tax law requires.

Your rights

Under POPIA you may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, object to processing, and withdraw consent (which does not undo processing already carried out). Email hello@getadoc.co.za and we will respond. If you are listed in the directory and do not wish to be, tell us and we will remove the listing. You may also complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa.

Our terms and conditions explain how the rest of the service works, including our cancellation, refund and delivery policies.