Privacy Statement

LegalWills.co.za has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to privacy.  The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for this website, https://www.legalwills.co.za/.

Personal Information

We maintain a record of all information that you submit to LegalWills.co.za. We will not resell, trade, lease or rent to third parties any personally identifiable information about you or about any of your designated Keyholders®, message recipients, or anybody you identify in the course of using any of the services provided here at LegalWills.co.za.

Some users will be referred to us from a third party after having established a customer relationship with that third party. If a client of a third party uses any of our services, having been referred to us by the third party, that third party may from time to time be granted access to personally identifiable information, including data entered by the client into the services used at LegalWills.co.za.

Although there are no plans in place, in the event that our company is acquired by another company, then it is likely that the databases managed by us would be included as part of that acquisition. All customers would be notified of this event, and would be given the opportunity to remove their data from our systems.

Our site's registration form requires users to give us contact information (such as their name and email address).  We use customer contact information from the registration form to send the user information about our company and promotional material from some of our partners, but only if the user has requested to receive such information.  If permitted by you, LegalWills.co.za may use this personal information to contact you, your Keyholders® or your message recipients for various reasons relating to the services offered through the site.  For example, you may receive a notice from LegalWills.co.za to update your Last Will and Testament if a law has changed in your local jurisdiction which may affect your Will, or you may receive a reminder to update your message recipient email addresses.  In addition, we may wish to inform you about new features we have added to the website, or we may wish to find out more about how useful you find particular features or services.  Users may opt-in or opt-out of receiving future mailings; see the "Choice/Opt-in and Opt-out" section below.

Our site uses order forms for customers to request some of our products and services.  These forms collect additional customer contact information (such as their mailing address) and financial information (such as their credit card number).  To process orders, we require collection of the customer's name, billing address, phone number, email address, shipping address and credit card information.  We use this information solely to process customer orders and, if any questions or issues should arise, to contact customers about their order.  We share this information, and only that information which is absolutely necessary, with those third parties that are involved in the processing of customer orders.  For example, in the normal course of doing business we may be required to contact the financial institution that issued a customer's credit card and to provide shipping address information to the shipping carrier that delivers customer orders.  The customer's contact information is also used to get in touch with them when necessary.  Financial information that is collected is used to bill the customer for products and services.  LegalWills.co.za does not store any customer credit card information on our website, in our databases, or on our web servers.

Your member registration and contact information (such as your name and email address) is stored in your member profile. This information can be accessed by the owners, administrators and support staff of LegalWills.co.za for the purposes of maintaining the website and processing customer service requests.  This information may be used to contact our customers if they have requested us to do so.

Once you have established an account with LegalWills.co.za and have chosen to create some messages to be delivered in the future via email, you have the option of notifying your email recipients that they have been selected to receive an email message from you (with or without revealing your name) and that they should notify LegalWills.co.za if their email address changes.  All of this activity is under your control, based on the options and preferences you have selected for this particular service.

The nature of our services also require that we collect sensitive personal information from our customers.  For example, we may require you to specify your property and asset information for the purposes of creating your Last Will and Testament.  We use industry standard encryption algorithms for storing all of this sensitive personal information in a highly encrypted format on our server, and the design of LegalWills.co.za ensures that this sensitive information is only made available to the specific people designated by yourself, and only at the appropriate time.  More information regarding the security of this sensitive information is described below, in the Security section. 

In accordance with all applicable law, you may request a report of all of the personal information we have collected from you and stored in our database by contacting us. We will require you to verify your identity before providing you with such a report.

Security

This site uses state-of-the-art digital encryption and security technologies to protect the privacy and security of our member information and has specific security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control.

All data passing from your computer to LegalWills.co.za is authenticated and encrypted using 256-bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption using technologies provided by Comodo, the world's largest SSL certificate provider focused solely on security. This is the most advanced level of encryption available today, and it means that any information sent from your computer is scrambled in a way which makes it completely unintelligible if intercepted. When you are on a secure section within the LegalWills.co.za site (i.e. after you have logged in as a member), a padlock will appear on your web browser. This is your assurance that the encryption is in place and that you are communicating across a secure link.

Furthermore, all sensitive personal information is stored in a highly encrypted format on our server.  We use an industry standard high security streaming-encryption algorithm known as "RSA" to encrypt all sensitive personal information before it is stored online. RSA is a public-key cryptosystem developed by MIT professors Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. (To give you a feeling for the level of security provided by this encryption, it has been estimated that with the most efficient algorithms known to date, it would take a computer operating at 1 million instructions per second over 300 quintillion years to break the encryption.)  Also, the encryption method used ensures that the only way possible to access and view the sensitive personal information stored here by a LegalWills.co.za member is by using a private internal encryption key which is unique for every member.  Our software algorithms ensure that the encryption and decryption of a member's sensitive personal information can only be performed by the member themselves, or by those designates to which the member has provided a separate unique key known as a "Keyholder® ID".  It is not even possible for the operators of this website to decrypt a member's sensitive personal information without knowledge of this encryption key.  Note that some services require temporary decryption of a member's documents as part of the operation of providing that service.  For example, if the member wants to have their Will reviewed by one of our legal professionals, or wants to have their documents printed and mailed to them, then the software will automatically decrypt these documents as part of the member's instructions to have these services performed.

We also provide 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) and recommend that all members turn on this feature within their account, to protect against unauthorized access. 2FA works by adding an additional layer of security to your online account. It requires an additional login credential – beyond just the UserID and Password – to gain account access. Getting that second credential requires access to something that belongs to you, such as a cell phone and/or a personal email address.

As an additional security measure, all successful and unsuccessful attempts to login to a member's account are logged in our database along with date/time stamps, IP addresses, and other detectable information from the user.  This information will be used for law enforcement purposes and for the protection of our members should there be any suspicion of unauthorized access to our database.

Furthermore, we offer members the option of receiving an email alert message whenever their sensitive personal information is accessed, or attempted to be accessed, using a valid key.  If unauthorized access is suspected, clicking a link within the email will immediately disable access to the member's sensitive personal information for that key, until the member re-enables the access themselves, or until we are contacted by the member and provided with specific information validating their identity.

To protect against catastrophic data loss, daily backups are performed on each of our servers. Hence, if any one of our servers experienced technical difficulties, our member data would not be at risk.

Physical protection of our primary systems includes:

  • Fire detection and fire suppression systems with dry pipe pre-action sprinkler systems
  • N + 1 redundant power supplies, providing dual power feeds and backup batteries, water coolant systems and generators
  • N + 1 redundant climate control, providing primary and backup chiller units, cooling towers, and water storage
  • Local network operations center (NOC) for monitoring all data center operations
  • 24x7 monitoring and support of network connection and server availability
  • 24x7 uniformed guard service with interior and exterior closed-circuit television surveillance
  • Electronic access at all data center entrances, including biometric hand scanners
  • Electronic key management systems and individually keyed cabinets

The most important security element of any service is the team that runs it. We do not use any temporary staff, nor do we use any offshore or outsourced staff. All of our services were developed locally, and no contract staff were used in the coding of our site. Furthermore, every member of our support team is a full time employee and has been with the company for over five years. We all love working here and are here to help you.

As you can tell by reading the above, we take the security and privacy of all of our member information very seriously.

Choice/Opt-in and Opt-out

Our site provides visitors the opportunity to opt-in and opt-out of receiving email communications from us and our partners at the point where we request information about the visitor. Members can also opt-in and opt-out of receiving future email communications by visiting https://www.legalwills.co.za/, logging in with their member UserID and Password, and changing their "Member Email" preferences in their member profile. In order to comply with privacy regulations including GDPR, PIPEDA, and other international privacy laws, by default the member preference is set to "opt-out".

Furthermore, this site allows users to remove all of their information from our database, to not receive future communications, or to no longer receive our service, either by sending an email to [email protected], or by sending postal mail to the company address listed on our Contact Us page.

Sharing of Information and Unsolicited Communications

Aside from the aforementioned third parties involved in the processing of customer orders, we do not share personally identifiable customer information with any other entities.

In addition, we do not send to customers any communications that they do not explicitly request from us.  For example, the only way for a member to receive our email news updates is if they explicitly choose to subscribe, either when joining as a new member, or by checking the appropriate box in their member profile when they are logged in.

Corrections/Updates

This site gives users an option for changing and modifying information previously provided.  Members can simply visit https://www.legalwills.co.za/, login, and modify any information using the link available on the Member Home Page.

Cookies

Our site uses a feature of your browser called a "cookie" to keep track of your identity and preferences while you are connected to our site. There are two types of cookies: those that store and retrieve information from your computer's hard drive, and "per-session" cookies which do not store or retrieve any information from your hard drive. LegalWills.co.za only uses per-session cookies. These per-session cookies are temporary, reside only in memory (not on your hard drive), and are destroyed when you leave the site or if you remain inactive for 30 minutes. By avoiding the use of cookies which store information on your computer's hard drive, LegalWills.co.za is ensuring that any information about our members is not in danger of being disclosed to other people or services which may have access to your system.

We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. In particular, Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site. Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our users based on their visit to our site and other sites on the Internet. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

In addition, our site hosts cookies provided by other third parties. These include:

  • Google Analytics (for our reporting of traffic and page views on the website)
  • Yahoo/Bing ads (for our reporting of conversions from ads placed on the Yahoo/Bing network)
  • Azure Application Insights Client Analytics (for website health and traffic analysis)

We do not use any Facebook or Twitter tracking pixels nor do we allow Facebook or Twitter to create any cookies on our website.

The protection, privacy and security of our member information is one of our highest priorities.

Links

This site contains links to other sites.  LegalWills.co.za is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such Web sites.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this Website, feel free to contact us.