Privacy notice. What we collect, and why.

MOTERA (builtbymotera.com) is an independent, founder-led digital agency, founded and operated by Christian Bartis in Durban, South Africa. MOTERA is not a registered company: Christian Bartis runs it personally, as a sole proprietor trading as MOTERA. He decides why and how your details are used, so he is the responsible party under South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) and, where the UK GDPR applies, the controller. In this notice, “we” means Christian Bartis, trading as MOTERA.

Legal name

Christian Bartis, trading as MOTERA

Location

Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Information Officer

Christian Bartis

Postal correspondence

A postal address is not currently published. For privacy requests or to arrange postal correspondence, email hello@builtbymotera.com.

Email

hello@builtbymotera.com

When you send an enquiry

• Your name, email address and company or organisation.
• Your project category, a short description and your preferred timeframe.
• Anything you add as additional context.
• Your answer to “How did you hear about MOTERA?”, if you give one.

Sent with the enquiry automatically

• Campaign tags (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and utm_content), if the address you arrived at carries them, for example on a link we shared.
• The host name of the website you came from, such as a search engine or social network. Not the full address.

Your browser reads these two items when the form page opens and sends them only if you send an enquiry. We do not store them in your browser.

Required and optional

We need your name, email, company, category, description and timeframe to reply, and the form will not send without them. Everything else is optional.

When you email us

We receive your email address and whatever you write.

Technical data

Cloudflare, which hosts this site, handles your IP address and basic request details to deliver pages, to limit how many enquiries one address can send each minute and to keep the site secure. It keeps short-lived technical logs for that purpose. They can include the address of the page requested, with any campaign tags. The log entries our own code writes record a request ID, the project category and technical error codes, never your name, email or message.

• Replying to you. We use your enquiry to answer it and to talk about a possible project. You ask us for this before any agreement exists. Basis: UK GDPR Article 6(1)(b); POPIA section 11(1)(b).
• Running a secure, useful site. We use technical data to block spam and limit abuse, and we use the source answer and campaign tags to see which of our channels lead to an enquiry. Visit counts are aggregate. This is in our legitimate interests. Basis: UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f); POPIA section 11(1)(f). You can object; see Your rights.

We do not sell your details, we add no one to a mailing list, and we make no automated decisions about you.

We use a small number of services to run the site and receive enquiries. Resend handles your details only to deliver our notifications. Cloudflare handles them to run the site. For the Turnstile bot check it also acts as a controller of the technical signals it uses to improve bot detection; see Cloudflare’s Turnstile Privacy Addendum. Our inbox is a Gmail account, which Google runs under its own terms and privacy policy.

• Cloudflare (hosting). Delivers this website and runs the code that receives the enquiry form.
• Cloudflare Turnstile (bot check). Checks that a person is sending the form. It processes your IP address and browser details such as the user-agent. It loads from challenges.cloudflare.com as you reach the later steps of the form, and it may keep one key in your browser’s local storage for that domain. That key is not a cookie.
• Cloudflare Web Analytics (visit counts). Counts page views and where they come from, in aggregate. It uses no cookies or browser storage and builds no profile of individual visitors.
• Resend (email delivery). Sends the enquiry notification to us from its Ireland (EU) region. Resend keeps a copy of each notification, with its content, and its logs for about 30 days, stored in the United States.
• Cloudflare Email Routing and Google Gmail (our inbox). Cloudflare forwards mail sent to hello@builtbymotera.com, including enquiry notifications, to a Gmail account that we read and answer from. Cloudflare does not store the message itself, but its Email Routing records keep the sender, recipient and subject line, which includes your name and project category, for about 31 days. Enquiry emails are kept in that account, under Google’s own terms and privacy policy.

We do not share your details with anyone else unless the law requires it.

MOTERA sets no cookies. This site has no advertising, social media or Google Analytics tracking.

• The home page keeps a flag called motera-intro, with the value 1, in your tab’s session storage so the opening animation does not repeat in that tab. It identifies no one, is not sent anywhere and is removed when you close the tab.
• Cloudflare Turnstile may keep one key in local storage for challenges.cloudflare.com, as described above.

Cloudflare, Resend and Google run their services across several countries, so your details can be processed outside South Africa and the United Kingdom, including in the United States. Resend sends mail from its Ireland (EU) region but keeps its account data, including email logs, in the United States. For Cloudflare and Resend we rely on the data processing terms and transfer safeguards they publish. Google handles the mail in our Gmail account under its own terms and privacy policy.

• Enquiries that do not become a project: we keep the email conversation for up to 12 months after our last message, then delete it from our inbox. We check for expired conversations every month. Google keeps a deleted message in Trash for up to 30 days and may hold backup copies for a limited period after that.
• If we work together, we keep project records for as long as our agreement and the law need.
• Resend’s copy of each notification, with its content, and its logs: about 30 days, set by Resend.
• Cloudflare Email Routing records (sender, recipient and subject line, which includes your name and project category): about 31 days, set by Cloudflare.
• Cloudflare’s technical logs: up to 7 days, set by Cloudflare.
• Visit counts: aggregate figures with no profile of any person.

This website does not store enquiries. They exist as email only.

You can ask us to tell you what we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to limit how we use it, or to stop using it where we rely on our legitimate interests. Under the UK GDPR you can also ask for a copy of what you gave us in a portable form.

Write to hello@builtbymotera.com. We may need to check that the request comes from you. We will respond without undue delay and within one month of receiving your request. If a request is complex, UK data protection law allows up to two more months; if we need them, we will tell you why within the first month.

Tell us first and we will try to put it right. You can also complain to the regulator in your country.

• South Africa: the Information Regulator, inforegulator.org.za
• United Kingdom: the Information Commissioner’s Office, ico.org.uk

If what we collect or how we use it changes, we update this page and the date at the top.