PlainAid (Pty) Ltd is the responsible party for the personal information described in this notice.
Registration number: K2026708256
Contact: info@plainaid.co.za
Information Officer: Pienaar le Roux
PlainAid is a free, independent website that helps South Africans compare medical aid scheme plans and find in-network hospitals. We are not a medical aid scheme, broker, administrator, or Financial Services Provider (FSP) ourselves. Where you'd like advice, we connect you — only with your consent — to a Verified Partner: an independently registered, FAIS-accredited broker who isn't affiliated with any single scheme.
We collect and process personal information to:
PlainAid does not currently send marketing emails or newsletters to site visitors — see Section 7.
| Category | Examples |
|---|---|
| Contact details | Name, phone number, email address |
| Preferences you tell us | Cover type interest, budget range, preferred contact method |
| Usage information | Pages viewed, searches, plans compared, hospitals viewed |
| Approximate location | City/province/country, resolved from your IP address — we don't store the IP address itself |
| Consent records | Whether and when you agreed to be contacted by a Verified Partner |
We do not ask for or knowingly collect special personal information — your health status, ID number, or medical history. The Site compares plan benefits (what a plan covers), not your personal health.
We process your personal information on the basis of your consent (for lead/callback form submissions and Verified Partner sharing) and our legitimate interest in operating and improving a free public information service (for aggregate, non-identifying usage data).
PlainAid does not use cookies. The Site uses your browser's session storage — cleared automatically the moment you close the tab — purely to hand information between pages you're already using: for example, remembering which scheme you clicked into, or carrying your answers from the 90-second guided flow through to the comparison tool. Nothing in session storage is sent to us or stored on our servers.
Separately, we log basic, first-party usage events directly to our own database — which pages you view, searches you run, plans you compare, hospitals you look up — tagged with an approximate location (city/province/country) resolved from your IP address via a third-party lookup service, ipapi.co. We don't store your actual IP address, only the coarse location it resolves to, and today these events aren't linked to a persistent identifier that follows you across separate visits. We don't use Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, or any advertising or cross-site tracking technology.
PlainAid does not currently send marketing or promotional emails to site visitors. If that changes in future, we'll only do so with your opt-in consent as POPIA's direct marketing rules (section 69) require, and every message will include a clear, working way to unsubscribe. Any follow-up you receive after requesting a callback comes directly from the Verified Partner you consented to be contacted by — not from PlainAid.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with data brokers or advertisers.
Our infrastructure providers (Supabase, Netlify, ipapi.co) may process and store data on servers outside South Africa, depending on server region. Where this happens, we take reasonable steps to ensure the destination country has adequate data protection safeguards, as required by section 72 of POPIA.
Lead and analytics data is protected by database-level Row Level Security: the public website can submit information (a lead, a search, a comparison) but cannot read any of it back — only a signed-in PlainAid administrator can view submitted leads or analytics. All data in transit is encrypted (HTTPS).
We retain lead information for as long as reasonably needed to fulfil your request and a limited period afterwards, and aggregate usage analytics for longer periods to understand trends. You can request deletion at any time.
PlainAid is meant for adults making their own or their family's medical aid decisions, and the Site isn't directed at children. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we'll delete it.
Under POPIA, you have the right to:
If you believe we haven't handled your personal information properly, you can contact us directly first, or lodge a complaint with South Africa's Information Regulator:
Website: inforegulator.org.za
Complaints page: inforegulator.org.za/complaints
See also: Privacy Policy · Terms of Use