Crawler and Data Collection Notice

ProperPics · Effective date: 19 June 2026

This notice explains ProperPicsBot, the automated web crawler operated by ProperPics. It tells you what the crawler collects, where it collects it from, why, how to block it, and how to have anything we hold about you removed.

We publish it because South African law requires it. Where we collect personal information about someone from a source other than that person, section 18 of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) obliges us to take reasonably practicable steps to make them aware of the collection and of the source it came from, together with our identity, our address and our purpose. This page is that notice, and it stays published.

Who operates the crawler

ProperPicsBot is operated by Warwick Brown (sole proprietor), trading as ProperPics, of 18 Murray Avenue, Morningside Manor, Sandton, Gauteng, South Africa. Our registration status is: Not applicable — sole proprietorship (no CIPC registration). We are the responsible party for the information the crawler collects.

Our Information Officer under POPIA is Warwick Brown. Privacy and data-subject requests go to privacy@properpics.co.za; general enquiries go to hello@properpics.co.za. The same details are repeated in full at the foot of this page.

What ProperPicsBot collects

ProperPicsBot visits the public pages of estate-agency websites, principally team, agent, office and branch pages, and records the published business contact details of estate agents. In practice that is:

the agent's name;
the agency and, where shown, the branch or office;
the agent's published work email address;
the town, city or suburb the agent works in;
the agency's website address; and
a dated copy of the page the details were published on, kept as evidence of where they came from, so that we can tell you the source if you ask.

We only crawl domains an operator has individually reviewed and approved beforehand. We do not crawl the web at large, we do not follow links off the approved domain, and we do not buy or exchange lists.

What ProperPicsBot does not collect

No listing photographs and no images of any kind.
No listing copy, property descriptions, prices or property details.
No private or authenticated content. The crawler has no login credentials, does not attempt to sign in, does not submit forms and does not read anything a member of the public could not read.
No telephone or WhatsApp numbers, even where they are published. We cannot lawfully use them before you consent, so we do not hold them.
Nothing beyond published business contact details. We do not collect identity numbers, addresses of homes, financial information or any of the special personal information described in POPIA section 26.

Why we collect it

For one purpose only: so that we may write to an estate agent once, to ask whether we may send them information about ProperPics's virtual staging service. We rely on POPIA section 12(2)(b), which permits collection from a source other than the data subject where the information is contained in or derived from a public record or has deliberately been made public by the data subject. A work email address published on an agency's own team page is exactly that.

Being collected does not mean being marketed to. POPIA section 69(2) allows us to send a prospect in South Africa one approach, and that approach may only be a request for consent. We honour that limit absolutely: one approach, ever, whether or not you reply. Nothing further is sent unless you have given consent, and consent means a positive reply from you. Opening our email, or clicking a link in it, is not consent and we do not treat it as such. How we handle information after that point is set out in our Privacy Policy.

If you never reply, we delete the record within 90 days of the approach. We keep only a one-way hash of the email address, which cannot be read back into an address, so that the same address can never be collected or contacted again.

How to identify our crawler

ProperPicsBot identifies itself on every single request. This is the exact User-Agent string it sends, and the contact URL in it resolves to this page:

ProperPicsBot/1.0 (+https://properpics.co.za/legal/bot)

We do not disguise the crawler as a browser, and we do not run it from anonymous addresses. If a request in your logs claims to be ProperPicsBot but does not behave as this page describes, it is not us. Please tell us at privacy@properpics.co.za and we will help you establish that.

How to block us

Add this stanza to the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. It blocks ProperPicsBot from your entire site, and nothing else:

User-agent: ProperPicsBot
Disallow: /

You may of course disallow only certain paths instead. Either way, we read robots.txt before we fetch anything on a domain and again on every later visit, we obey it as written, and if we cannot read or parse it we do not crawl at all. We also honour a Crawl-delay directive, and where none is given we leave a deliberate pause between requests so that we are never a load on your server. Blocking us in robots.txt requires no email, no account and no reply from us.

A block stops future collection. It does not, by itself, delete what we already hold, so if you want existing records removed as well, please ask us using the next section.

How to have your details removed

Email privacy@properpics.co.za and ask. You do not need to give a reason, there is no charge, and you do not need to be a customer. Say whether you are asking for:

one person, giving the email address concerned; or
an entire agency or domain, in which case we delete every record we collected from it and add the domain to a permanent do-not-crawl list.

We acknowledge every request within 5 working days and complete it within 30 days of receiving it, which is the outer limit we hold ourselves to rather than a target. When we delete a record we keep only the same one-way hash described above, purely so that the address cannot be collected again by a later crawl. If you would rather we did not even keep that, say so and we will remove it too.

Requests may also be posted to the Information Officer, Warwick Brown, ProperPics, 18 Murray Avenue, Morningside Manor, Sandton, Gauteng, South Africa.

Your rights

The right of access (POPIA section 23). You may ask us to confirm, free of charge, whether we hold personal information about you, and to give you a record of it. We will tell you what we hold and where we got it, which for anything the crawler collected means the specific page and the date we read it. Write to privacy@properpics.co.za. The full procedure, the prescribed form and the fees that apply to a formal request are in our PAIA Manual.

The right to object (POPIA section 11(3)) and to correction or deletion (section 24). You may object to our processing at any time, free of charge, and you may ask us to correct or delete information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date or obtained unlawfully. An objection stops the processing. Write to the same address.

The right to complain. If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a request, you may complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) at POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za, or by post to Woodmead North Office Park, 54 Maxwell Drive, Woodmead, Johannesburg, 2191. Full contact details are in section 12 of our Privacy Policy. You do not have to raise it with us first, although we would rather you did so that we can put it right.

Who we are: Warwick Brown (sole proprietor), trading as ProperPics.; Registration: Not applicable — sole proprietorship (no CIPC registration)
Address: 18 Murray Avenue, Morningside Manor, Sandton, Gauteng, South Africa
Contact: General: hello@properpics.co.za; Privacy / data requests: privacy@properpics.co.za
Information Officer (POPIA): Warwick Brown