Privacy policy

Media Hack Collective (MHC) is a publisher registered as a PTY/Ltd in South Africa. MHC publishes a range of publications and services under brand names including The Outlier and Treevolution.

MHC is committed to protecting the privacy of its users. We will not hand over user information to any third party without compelling and justified legal reasons. We also do not, and will not, sell or share your information with anyone else without your knowledge and permission.

We collect a minimal amount of information from each user, most of it optional, which helps us improve our products and services. This data may include:

• Email addresses
• Names

Any personal data we collect related to your account with MHC/TheOutlier is voluntary and we will remove that data from our systems if you contact us: privacy@theoutlier.co.za

Like most publishers we track aggregated data about how our sites are used: how much time is spent on our sites, articles read and so on. We need that data to better understand how we can improve the services we provide and improve our service to you.

Unlike most publishers, we do not use Google Analytics to collect user data on our site. We use Fathom Analytics which is first and foremost privacy-focused. While this means we collect far less data on users than most publishers do, we believe respect for your information and privacy is paramount. You can read more about Fathom’s privacy approach here.

We also use basic email tracking (emails opened etc) to ensure that we’re sending you relevant information or offering you the chance to opt out if you are not interested. On our websites, we use standard cookies to keep track of options like popup windows, game statistics and preferences. These are private to you and we do not share specific information with anyone outside of MHC.

We use a number of third-party technical services to run our business and we believe these to be the best services available and the ones that best protect the information we store.

This list includes:

• TouchbasePro (email services)
• Digital Ocean (web hosting and database services)
• Linode (web hosting and backup)
• Vercel (web hosting)
• Postmark (transactional emails)
• TypeForm (user feedback)

MHC is committed to protecting user information. If you have any questions or require any further information on this please email privacy@theoutlier.co.za.