Privacy
What this site is
GazetteSearch is a search index over the South African Government Gazette — a public legal-record publication. Notices appear here because they were lawfully published in the gazette by the original notifying party (executor, attorney, court, Master's office, etc). We mirror what is already a matter of public record.
What we log
We log a small amount of data per request, used for rate limiting and to understand which queries are useful enough to improve:
- Your IP address (for the 10-searches-per-day rate limit)
- The query text and timestamp
- The number of results returned and the response time
- Your paid-tier token, if any
We do not set advertising cookies. We do not share logs with
third parties. The only cookie we set is paid_key,
a sticky token for paid accounts.
Analytics
We use Plausible Analytics for aggregate page-view counts. Plausible is privacy-friendly: it does not set cookies, does not track users across sites, and does not record IP addresses or any personal information. The purpose is to know which pages get traffic and which referrers bring visitors — nothing more.
Personal data in notices
Notices in the Government Gazette routinely include names, ID numbers, addresses, and case references. These were published by the original notifying party as a matter of statutory requirement — for example, the Insolvency Act and the Administration of Estates Act both require notice publication as a precondition for legal effect.
We do not edit, redact, or alter the published text. The fields you see on a notice page were extracted directly from the gazette PDF.
Corrections and takedown
We will not unpublish a public legal notice — the original publication in the gazette is what makes it a record, not its appearance here, and removing it from this site would not change the underlying public record.
However, if you believe a notice on this site is materially wrong (e.g. the wrong person's name was matched to a notice, or our parser extracted a field incorrectly), email graham@phasetransitions.ai with the notice URL and the correction. We aim to respond within a few business days.
Contact
graham@phasetransitions.ai — Graham Rowe, who runs this site.