Request Your Data

You can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to a particular use of it. This is your right under sections 23 to 25 of the Protection of Personal Information Act, 4 of 2013. It costs nothing, you do not have to give a reason, and asking will never affect how we treat you as a customer.

Requests go to our Information Officer, Alette de Beer, at alette@lowerland.co.za.

What you can ask for

• A copy. Confirmation of whether we hold personal information about you, and a copy of it in a readable form.
• A correction. If something we hold is wrong, incomplete, misleading or out of date, tell us and we will fix it. If we disagree, we will record that you disputed it.
• A deletion. We will delete information we are no longer entitled to keep. See the limits below.
• An objection. You can object to any use we base on legitimate interest — most commonly our website measurement. We will stop, and we will not ask you to justify it.
• Withdrawal of consent. If you asked for a back-in-stock notification and changed your mind, say so and we will remove you.

What to include

The button above opens an email with these headings already in it. If you would rather write your own, please tell us:

• Which of the five things above you want.
• Your full name.
• The email address you used when ordering or when creating your account — this is how we find your records. If you write from a different address we may not be able to match you.
• An order number, if you have one. It makes this much faster.
• What you would like us to do, in your own words.

Confirming it is really you

Before we send anyone a copy of personal information, we need to be reasonably satisfied that they are the person the information is about. Handing your order history to someone who simply claimed to be you would itself be a breach of POPIA.

Usually it is enough that you write from the email address on the account. If we cannot match you that way, we may ask one or two questions only you would be able to answer, or ask for proof of identity. We will ask for the least we need, we will not keep a copy of an identity document beyond confirming it, and we will never ask you for a password.

If you have an account, you can also see and change much of this yourself under My Account — your addresses, contact details and order history — without needing to ask us at all.

What happens next

1. We acknowledge your request, normally within 3 working days.
2. We confirm your identity if we need to.
3. We find everything we hold, across our shop, our accounting system and our correspondence.
4. We respond in full, aiming to do so within 30 days. If it will take longer, we will tell you before that period ends and explain why.

There is no charge for any of this.

Where we cannot delete everything

Some records we are obliged to keep, and a deletion request cannot override a legal duty. We will always tell you exactly what we are keeping and why, rather than simply refusing.

• Invoices and accounting records — kept for 5 years from the end of the relevant tax year, as the Tax Administration Act requires.
• Age verification records for wine orders — kept for as long as we must be able to demonstrate that an alcohol sale was lawful.
• Records needed for a live dispute or claim — kept until it is resolved.

Outside those, deletion means deletion. We will also close your account if you ask us to.

Asking on behalf of someone else

You may make a request for another person if you are legally entitled to act for them — as a parent or guardian of a child, under a power of attorney, or as the executor of an estate. Send us proof of that authority together with the request.

Records that are not about you

This page is for your own personal information. If you want access to some other record we hold, that is a request under the Promotion of Access to Information Act, and it works differently — there is a prescribed form, a fee, and you must identify the right you are seeking to protect. See our PAIA Manual.

If you are not satisfied

Tell our Information Officer first — most problems are a misunderstanding about what we hold. If that does not resolve it, you may complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa), which supervises compliance with POPIA. Its complaint forms and current contact details are on its website at inforegulator.org.za. You do not need our permission to complain, and you do not have to come to us first.

What we hold and why is set out in full in our Privacy Policy.