Privacy Notice

TasksmithAI is a trading name. The business is owned and run by its founder as a sole proprietor and is not a registered company. For the information described here, we are the controller (the “responsible party” under South African law).

We operate from South Africa and work with clients in several countries. The owner’s full legal name and postal address are given in every agreement we sign, and we will give them to you on request, including if you need them to make a complaint or serve a notice. Write to hello@tasksmithai.com and we will reply.

This notice covers the website. Where we process information inside a paid engagement, we normally act on the client’s instructions as their processor (an “operator”) under a separate written agreement, and their own privacy notice applies to the people whose information it is. Section 8 says more about that.

We collect very little. The site sets no cookies, uses no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind. Nothing about your visit is recorded by us unless you choose to fill in one of the three forms.

We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for marketing, and we do not use it to train AI models.

If you fill in the enquiry form. Your name, work email address, the description of your problem, and anything you attach or link to. We use it to understand your enquiry, reply to you, and decide whether and how we could help. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in responding to business enquiries and, where you are an individual, the steps you have asked us to take before entering a contract.

If you apply through the careers form. Your name, email address, the three sentences you write, your chosen area of work, the example you give and your CV if you attach one. We use it only to consider you for work with us. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in recruiting, and the steps you have asked us to take before entering a contract.

If you sign up to the newsletter. Your email address only, used only to send the newsletter, on the basis of your consent. Every issue carries an unsubscribe link, and you can also unsubscribe by emailing us.

We ask you not to send sensitive material through the forms, and the enquiry page says so plainly. Please redact before you send, and please leave out passwords, payment card details, health information, information about children, legally privileged material and anything you are under a duty not to disclose. If you need confidentiality first, tell us and we will put an agreement and a safer channel in place before you send anything.

If you email us directly, we hold whatever you put in the email for as long as we need it to deal with the matter.

Formspree (United States) receives and forwards the three website forms. Your submission passes through their systems and reaches us by email.

Our email provider holds the message once it arrives.

Google Fonts. The site loads its typeface from Google’s font servers, which means your browser’s IP address is visible to Google when a page loads. We set no cookies through this and receive nothing back.

YouTube. One page carries a short video. Nothing from YouTube loads until you press play. When you do, the video plays through YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com), which is run by Google under its own privacy policy. If you would rather not, there is a plain link to watch it on YouTube instead.

AI tools. We may use AI tools to help us read and assess what you send. We use them on terms that do not permit the provider to train models on the content.

We use carefully chosen subcontractors from time to time, all bound by confidentiality obligations. Beyond that we share personal information only where the law requires it, or to establish or defend a legal claim.

The site links out to other websites, including Substack, Loom and various companies. Once you follow a link you are on someone else’s site, under their terms and their privacy policy. We are not responsible for what they do.

We are based in South Africa and our suppliers are largely in the United States and Europe, so information you send us crosses borders. Where that involves personal information protected by UK or EU law, we rely on the appropriate safeguards available for those transfers, including the standard contractual clauses our suppliers offer. Where South African law applies, we transfer only on the bases permitted by section 72 of POPIA.

If you would like to know which suppliers are involved in a particular matter, ask us and we will tell you.

Enquiries that go nowhere: up to 12 months, then deleted.

Enquiries that become work: for the engagement, and then for as long as we need to meet our tax and legal obligations, normally five years.

Job applications: 12 months, unless you ask us to remove them sooner, so that we can come back to you if something suitable comes up.

Newsletter: until you unsubscribe.

You can ask us at any time to delete what you sent, and we will, except where the law requires us to keep it.

We keep access to a minimum, use strong authentication on the accounts involved, and work on redacted or masked copies wherever the job allows it. Where an engagement calls for it, the work runs on the client’s own machines or inside their network, and nothing is copied to us at all.

We should be straight about one thing. Anything sent through the website forms arrives by ordinary email, which is not a secure or confidential channel. Until we have agreed confidentiality terms with you in writing, treat it as you would any other email. That is why we ask you to send the shape of a problem rather than the contents of it.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach happens that is likely to harm you, we will notify you and the relevant regulator as the law requires.

When a client engages us and gives us access to their data, that data often contains personal information about other people, such as their own customers, staff or counterparties. In that situation the client decides why and how it is processed, so the client is the controller and we act on their written instructions as their processor.

If you are one of those people and you want to exercise your rights, please contact the organisation whose data it is. If you come to us, we will pass your request on to them and help them answer it.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw consent you have given.

Ask us at hello@tasksmithai.com. We will reply within 30 days. There is no charge unless a request is clearly excessive or repetitive, and we may need to confirm who you are before we act.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled something, please tell us first and we will try to put it right. You can also complain to a regulator: the Information Regulator in South Africa, the Information Commissioner’s Office in the United Kingdom, or your national data protection authority in the European Union.

This site sets no cookies. It uses no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels and no third-party scripts. It stores nothing in your browser. The one exception is the video: if you press play, YouTube’s privacy-enhanced player loads and may store data in your browser under Google’s own policy. Until you press play, nothing from YouTube loads at all.

Because of that, there is no cookie banner and nothing for you to accept or refuse. If that ever changes, we will update this notice and ask for your consent first where the law requires it.

The site is meant for businesses and for adults aged 18 or over. We do not knowingly collect information about children. Please do not send us information about children through the forms. If you believe we hold information about a child, tell us and we will delete it.

We may update this notice from time to time. The date at the top shows the latest version, and the version in force when you use the site is the one that applies.

Questions, requests and complaints about privacy go to hello@tasksmithai.com. If you need a postal address, ask and we will give you one.

This notice sits alongside our Terms of Use.