Scope. This notice applies to Office Vault EasySign only. Other products in the Office Vault range, including the Office Vault document management platform, are covered by their own separate privacy policy and are hosted differently.
In short. We collect what we need to run a signing service: your account details, the documents you upload, and a record of who opened and signed them. Documents are stored in South Africa. We don't sell your data or use your documents to train AI models.
1. Who is responsible
Office Vault Technology (Pty) Ltd (Reg. No. 2020/835556/07), of 56 Church Street, Olivedale, Johannesburg North, Randburg, 2188, South Africa, is the responsible party for personal information we collect about our own customers (your account details and how you use EasySign).
For the personal information inside documents you send — your signers' names, email addresses and signatures — you are the responsible party and we act as your operator under POPIA. We process that information on your instructions, to deliver the signing service.
Information Officer: Suniel Seejiram, Founder / Information Officer
Registered with the Information Regulator of South Africa — registration no. 2026-064465 (15 August 2026)
suniel@officevault.co.za · 010 500 1589 · 56 Church Street, Olivedale, Johannesburg North, Randburg, 2188
2. What we collect
| Category | Examples | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account information | Name, work email, company name, hashed password, plan — and, only if you choose to save them, your signature and initials, which you can remove at any time | To create and secure your account and bill you |
| Document content | The PDFs you upload and the fields placed on them | To display, sign and seal the document |
| Signer information | Signer name, email address, signature image, and any details they type into fields — and, only if the sender chooses an SMS code for them, their mobile number (which the sender may also use to remind them by SMS, if their account has SMS reminders switched on) | To deliver the document, check it is them, and record the signature |
| Billing information | Your plan, invoice history, and the last four digits and brand of the card used. Never the full card number | To take payment, issue invoices and keep proper accounting records |
| Signing evidence | IP address, timestamps, device information, and — only with the signer's permission — approximate location | To produce the audit trail and certificate that make a signature defensible |
| Usage information | Documents sent, feature use, error reports, feedback you submit | To operate, support and improve the Service |
| Referrals | Only if you sign up with another customer’s referral link or code: which account referred you, when your first payment cleared, and whether that earned them a free month. We also check whether your email domain or sign-up network matches theirs, and record only that it does — not the address or the network. The customer who referred you sees numbers only (how many signed up and qualified), never your name or company | To give the customer who referred you their free month, and keep the programme fair |
3. Lawful basis
We process personal information because it is necessary to perform our contract with you, to pursue our legitimate interest in operating and securing the Service, to comply with the law, and — for optional items such as location capture — with consent, which can be refused without preventing signing.
4. Where your information is stored
We are deliberately specific here, because "hosted in South Africa" is often used loosely:
- Your documents are stored in South Africa — in Amazon Web Services' Cape Town region (af-south-1).
- The application and database currently run on AWS infrastructure outside South Africa, because the hosting product we use for EasySign is not offered in the Cape Town region. This means account details and signing metadata (names, email addresses, timestamps, IP addresses) are processed outside the Republic.
- These transfers are made under section 72 of POPIA. AWS applies equivalent security standards across its regions and provides contractual data-protection terms, including Standard Contractual Clauses.
- Your documents themselves stay in South Africa — they are stored in Cape Town and they are not sent anywhere else, with one exception you have to switch on. If you use the free contract check, or turn on AI features in your account, the text of that document is sent to Mistral in the European Union to be read. That is the only circumstance in which the contents of a document leave the country, it never happens without being asked for, and section 5 sets out what Mistral does with it.
- We intend to move the EasySign application and database into the Cape Town region as the product matures, and this notice will be updated when we do.
5. Who else processes it
| Sub-processor | Service provided | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services, Inc. | Document storage (S3) | South Africa (af-south-1, Cape Town) |
| Amazon Web Services, Inc. | Application and database hosting | Outside South Africa — see section 4 |
| Zoho Corporation (ZeptoMail) | Transactional email: signing invitations, reminders, completion notices | Outside South Africa |
| Paystack | Payment processing, card tokenisation and payment receipts for paid plans | Outside South Africa |
| BulkSMS (Celerity Systems (Pty) Ltd) | Only when a sender chooses an SMS code for a signer, or reminds a signer by SMS. For a code: the signer's mobile number and the one-time code. For a reminder: the signer's mobile number, the sender's company name and the signer's signing link. Nothing else about the document is sent | Outside South Africa (AWS, Ireland) |
| Mistral AI SAS | Only if you use the free contract check, or switch on AI features in your account. The text of the document you submit is sent to Mistral to be read, and the reading is sent back. For a question about a document, or finding its dates, we also send the question asked and EasySign’s own signing record for it: who has signed, on what date, and who still has to. Nothing else about your account is sent | European Union (France) |
| Orange Dot Technology (Pty) Ltd | Customer support. Support staff may see your account details and document titles when responding to a request you raise | South Africa |
Mistral is the only one of these that reads what a document says, and it is the only one you have to switch on. Every other sub-processor above handles your documents as files — storing them, delivering a link, taking a payment — without anything reading the words inside. If you never use the contract check, nothing is ever sent to Mistral.
Mistral keeps a copy for about 30 days. They retain what is sent to them, and what they send back, for roughly 30 days for abuse monitoring, and then delete it. Zero-retention is an arrangement offered on their highest plan and we do not have it, so we are not going to tell you your document is not stored there. We will say so here if that changes.
We never see your card. Card details are entered on Paystack's own payment page and are never sent to, processed by, or stored on our servers. We keep only the last four digits and the card brand, so you can recognise which card is on file.
Where a sub-processor is located outside South Africa, transfers are made subject to section 72 of POPIA, relying on Standard Contractual Clauses and equivalent contractual protections.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.
Your documents are not used to train artificial intelligence models — not by us, and not by Mistral. Mistral’s terms for the API we use exclude API content from model training. Reading a document and training on it are different things, and only the first happens here.
6. How long we keep it
We keep personal information only as long as necessary, aligned with the retention schedule of the Office Vault group:
| Category | Retention period |
|---|---|
| Documents, signatures and audit trails | For as long as the account exists. Cancelling a subscription does not delete anything — it stops new documents being sent, and everything already signed stays available to view, download and verify. If the account is closed, we keep them for a further 30 days and then securely delete them, or return them on written request. A signed document's evidentiary value depends on its audit trail, so we never prune it. |
| Answers saved to finish later | Only if a signer presses Save and finish later: what they have typed, ticked or chosen, kept against their signing link so they can carry on from any device. Signatures, initials, drawings, photos and files are not kept this way. We delete it when they finish, decline or ask for a change, or when the document ends (completed, withdrawn, closed or expired). |
| User account records | Duration of the account plus 12 months, for audit and dispute resolution. |
| Financial and billing records | 7 years from the date of the transaction, as required by the Companies Act and tax legislation. |
| Referral records | 7 years, with billing records: which account referred which, and any free month we refunded. |
| Security records of refused sign-ins | 90 days. When a sign-in is refused — a wrong password, a locked-out address, a rate limit — we record the time, the IP address it came from and the email address that was tried. It is how we tell a customer who cannot get into their own account apart from somebody working through a list of addresses. It is deleted automatically after 90 days, and sooner if the account it relates to is closed. |
| Documents read by the free contract check | We keep nothing. The text is read and discarded — it is not written to our storage, our database, or any file on our servers. Mistral holds its own copy for about 30 days, as described in section 5, and that clock is theirs and not ours. |
| Documents read by AI features in your account | This one we do keep, and only while your account is open. When somebody in your account asks a question about a document, we extract that document’s text and store it so the same document never has to be read twice. We also keep the questions people asked and the page and quotation each answer relied on. We do not keep the answers to questions. When somebody in your account runs the contract check on a document, we keep its report with that document, so that people in your account can open and download it without the document being read again. All of it is deleted with the rest of your documents 30 days after your account closes, and it is only ever created for documents somebody has actually asked about or checked — if you never use AI features, none of it exists. |
| Feedback and support correspondence | 12 months from submission, unless an ongoing matter requires longer. |
Documents you delete move to Trash and can be restored. Permanently deleting a document removes it and its audit record, and cannot be undone.
You can close your account yourself in Settings. Closing signs everyone in the organisation out, stops your subscription and cancels anything still out for signature. Your signed documents and their audit trails are kept for 30 days from that point so you can ask us for copies, and are then permanently deleted. Financial and billing records are kept for the period in the table above, because tax legislation requires it.
7. How we protect it
- Encryption in transit (HTTPS/TLS) and encryption at rest in storage.
- Account passwords hashed with Argon2; optional two-step verification on accounts. A password a sender sets to lock a signed copy is kept encrypted, so that they can look it up again for the people who signed.
- Unique, random, expiring signing links; SHA-256 hashing of original and sealed documents.
- Access to production systems limited to authorised personnel.
- Refused sign-ins are recorded for 90 days so repeated attempts against an account can be seen and acted on. See section 6 for what that record holds.
Breach notification. In the event of a security compromise affecting personal information, we will notify affected parties and the Information Regulator in accordance with section 22 of POPIA, and within 72 hours of becoming aware of the breach.
If you need more detail about how we protect your information — for a security review or a vendor questionnaire — contact us at support@officevault.co.za.
8. Your rights
Under POPIA you may ask us to confirm what personal information we hold about you, to correct or delete it, to object to processing, or to complain. Write to support@officevault.co.za and we will respond within a reasonable time.
If you are a signer rather than an account holder, the company that sent you the document controls that information — please contact them first; we will assist them in responding.
9. Marketing and product feedback
If you hold an EasySign account, we may email you about the service itself — new features, changes to your plan, security notices, and occasional short surveys asking how we can improve. Section 69 of POPIA allows us to contact our own customers about our own similar products. Every one of these emails carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing never affects your account or the documents you have signed.
We do not market to your signers. Someone who receives a document from you through EasySign is your contact, not ours. We will not add them to a mailing list, and we will not send them anything other than the emails needed to deliver and complete that document.
We never sell or rent personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. If we ever wanted to use your information for something outside this notice, we would ask you first.
If you take part in a survey or send us feedback, we may quote it anonymously to improve the product or on our website. We will not attach your name, your company or your email address to a public quote without asking you.
10. Complaints to the Regulator
You may lodge a complaint with the Information Regulator of South Africa:
JD House, 27 Stiemens Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, 2001 · inforeg@justice.gov.za · inforegulator.org.za
11. Cookies
EasySign uses only what it needs to work: a session token to keep you signed in, and local storage for preferences. While you fill in a document to sign, the answers you have typed, ticked or chosen are also kept in local storage on your device, so a dropped connection or a closed tab does not lose them. They are not sent to us until you finish, unless you press Save and finish later (see section 6). Signatures are never kept this way, and on your device they are deleted when you finish, decline or ask for a change, and after 7 days at most. We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies.
12. Children’s information
Nobody under 18 may open an EasySign account or sign a document as a signer. Our account holders and signers are adults.
A document one of our customers sends may nevertheless contain information about a child — a school indemnity naming a pupil, a medical aid form listing a dependant, a beneficiary nomination. Section 34 of POPIA prohibits the processing of a child’s personal information unless one of the grounds in section 35 applies. The ground that applies here is section 35(1)(a): the prior consent of a competent person, usually a parent or guardian.
Obtaining that consent is the customer’s responsibility, not ours. The organisation sending the document is the responsible party. It decides what the document contains, who receives it, and whether a competent person has consented. We are its operator under section 21: we process the document on its instruction, we do not read it for our own purposes, and we do not use anything in it to build a profile, train a model or market to anyone.
Practically, that means we cannot tell you whether a particular document holds a child’s information. Unless the contract check has been used on it, nothing reads what a document says — the file is stored encrypted and its contents are not inspected. So we do not apply a separate retention rule to it. It is kept, and deleted, exactly as section 6 describes for the account that sent it, and the customer can delete it at any time.
The contract check is the one exception, and it never happens by itself. Somebody has to upload a document to it and tick a box saying they understand it will be read outside South Africa. If that is done, the text of that document is read — by Mistral, to answer the question asked of it, and by nobody at Orange Dot. It is still not used to build a profile, train a model or market to anyone. Do not put a document through it if you are not free to share what is in it.
If you are a parent or guardian who has signed something through EasySign and you want to know what is held about your child, ask the school, employer or organisation that sent it to you. They hold the record and they can act on it. If they need us to act, we will act on their instruction. If you cannot get a response from them, contact us at support@officevault.co.za and we will help you reach the right person.
If a child has opened an account or signed as a signer in their own right, that is outside what this service is for. Tell us and we will remove it.
13. Changes
We will update this notice as the Service changes, and will tell you about material changes by email or in the app.
Office Vault Technology (Pty) Ltd · Reg. No. 2020/835556/07
56 Church Street, Olivedale, Johannesburg North, Randburg, 2188, South Africa · 010 500 1589 · support@officevault.co.za