Privacy policy

Who we are

The Link and Link Driver apps are operated by LNK Mobility (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2026/618151/07, a company incorporated in the Republic of South Africa. We trade as Link.

LNK Mobility (Pty) Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bantu Technologies Group (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2025/616197/07, of Cape Town. Together we are the Link group.

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 — POPIA — LNK Mobility (Pty) Ltd is the responsible party for the personal information described here. We decide why and how it is processed, and we are accountable for it.

Our Information Officer is registered with the Information Regulator of South Africa, as POPIA requires. Write to them about anything in this notice — including if you think we have got something wrong.

Throughout, we and Link mean LNK Mobility (Pty) Ltd. You means whoever is reading: a rider, a driver-partner, someone on a waiting list, or a visitor to our website.

What we collect

We have split this by who you are, because a rider and a driver-partner don't give us the same things.

Everyone with a Link account Everyone

• Contact details — name, surname, mobile number, email address.
• Account and profile — profile photo if you add one, saved addresses, language, notification preferences, account status.
• Device information — device model, OS version, app version, mobile network, a device identifier, push token, IP address.
• How you use the app — screens opened, features used, crash and diagnostic logs, performance data.
• Communications with us — support tickets and emails when you contact support.

How you sign in, and what Apple or Google tell us Everyone

You can create a Link account with an email address and a password, or by using Sign in with Apple or Google Sign-In. What reaches us depends on which you choose.

• Sign in with Apple — Apple sends us an identifier unique to you and to Link, your email address, and, on the first sign-in only, your name if you agree to share it. Apple never sends it again, not even if you reinstall the app. Apple also lets you hide your real email address and give us a relay address instead; if you do that, the relay is all we ever see. We get nothing else, and no access to your Apple account.
• Google Sign-In — Google sends us an identifier unique to you and to Link, your name, your email address and your profile photo. We get no access to your Google account, your contacts, or anything else in it.
• Email and password — you give us the name and email address yourself. We never see your password. It is set and checked by our authentication provider, Google Firebase, and it does not reach our servers.

Signing in to Link with Apple or Google also tells Apple or Google that you did. What they do with that is their processing under their own privacy notices, not ours.

We verify your mobile number by SMS. A driver has to be able to reach you, and we have to be able to reach you about a trip, so every account needs a number we know is genuinely yours. After you sign in we send a one-time code by SMS and ask you to type it back.

• We keep the number, and the fact and time it was verified. We do not keep the code.
• The SMS goes through our authentication provider, so your number passes through their systems and your mobile network to reach you.
• The code is a service message, not marketing. You cannot opt out of it and still use Link, because typing it back is the only way we know the number works.

If you signed up before we required this, we will ask you for a number the next time you open the app.

If you're a rider Riders

• Trip information — pick-up and drop-off points, route taken, timestamps, distance, waiting time, trip status, cancellations, no-shows, and the fare.
• Location — your device's location while the app is open and you are requesting, taking or completing a trip. Collection stops when you close the app. You can switch location off in your device settings, but we can't dispatch a ride without it.
• Payment information — the method you choose, the amount charged, the R6 booking fee, transaction references and outcomes. Your full card number is entered directly with our payment processor and we never see or store it. We keep the card type and last four digits so you can recognise it.
• Link Credits — credits earned on each completed trip (10% of the fare, excluding the booking fee), your balance, and redemptions with our retail partners.
• Ratings and feedback — the rating and comments you give a driver, and the rating a driver gives you. Ratings you give are anonymous to the driver.
• Safety information — if you press the in-app emergency button, your identity, last known location, trip and vehicle details go straight to our safety team and, where we have an armed-response provider in place for your area, to that provider. See section 5.

If you're a driver-partner Drivers

Driving on Link is regulated work, so we collect more from you than from riders, and some of it we are legally required to hold.

• Identity and right to work — full name, South African ID number or passport and permit details, date of birth, and a photograph of your identity document.
• Licensing and compliance — driving licence, Professional Driving Permit (PrDP), operating licence from your Provincial Regulatory Entity, roadworthy certificate, vehicle insurance.
• Criminal background check — we may ask for a criminal record certificate that you get yourself from an accredited provider (MIE, Lexis RefCheck, SAPS or similar), with the provider's name and reference number so we can confirm it. A person on our team reviews it by hand. We don't commission criminal record or driving record checks, we don't use a background-screening provider, and no automated system or AI reads your certificate. If that changes, it is a new category of recipient and a material change under section 15, and we will tell you before it happens.
• Vetting outcome — the result of our review of the documents above: who checked them, when, whether each one was accepted or rejected, and why. Every approval and rejection is decided by a person on our team. Software may help them, as section 11 explains, but it doesn't decide.
• What software read from your documents — for your driving licence, PrDP, licence disc, roadworthy certificate and operating licence: the details our document-reading assistant found printed on them, and whether they matched what you entered.
• Vehicle information — make, model, year, colour, registration number, photographs.
• Banking and payment — bank name, account number and branch code, so we can pay you out. We do not hold a card or a debit order for you. Your day pass is deducted from what you have earned, never charged to a payment method.
• Financial records — daily day pass fees, fares collected, payouts, adjustments, invoices.
• Trip and location — your location while you are online in Link Driver, including between trips, so we can dispatch nearby requests, guide you and support you in an emergency. When you go offline, we stop collecting your location.
• Performance — acceptance and cancellation rates, completion rates, online hours, rider ratings, complaints, and investigation outcomes.

If you're on a waiting list

• Riders — name, surname, email address.
• Drivers — name, surname, email address, physical address, and vehicle make, model, year and registration number.

We use waiting-list information only to keep you posted about launch and to onboard you. Ask us to remove you and we delete it.

Why we process it, and our lawful basis

POPIA says we need a lawful basis for everything we do with your information. Here is ours, purpose by purpose.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed ours against your privacy and concluded ours don't override your rights. You can object — see section 9.

Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time. Withdrawing doesn't undo processing we did while the consent was valid.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only where there is a reason to, and only as much as the reason requires.

Between riders and drivers

When you book, the driver sees your first name, profile photo if you have one, pick-up location and destination. So that they can reach you about the pick-up, their app can call or message your mobile number, and the number is visible to them when it does. Numbers are not masked between riders and drivers, so treat the number you give us as one your driver can see.

You see the driver's first name, photo, rating, and the vehicle make, model, colour and registration number, so you can check the car that arrives is the car in the app.

After the trip, the driver can see your first name and reach you on that number for 24 hours, in case you left something in the car. Then it falls away.

Ratings and written feedback you give a driver are anonymous — the driver sees the score in their average, not who gave it.

Our service providers (operators)

These companies process information on our behalf under written contracts requiring them to keep it confidential, keep it secure, and use it only as we instruct. POPIA calls them our operators.

We describe them by category rather than by name, because the companies can change without the way we use your information changing. Want to know who they are today? Email privacy@getlink.co.za and we'll tell you.

• Cloud hosting and app infrastructure — Google Firebase and Google Cloud Platform. Our primary database and file storage are configured in the africa-south1 (Johannesburg) region.
• Automated document reading — Google Cloud's Vertex AI service, running Google's Gemini models in Google Cloud's European Union region. It gets only the driver documents, support messages and safety alerts described in section 11, only to read them for us, and Google may not use them to train its models. Support messages and safety alerts have names, phone numbers, email addresses, number plates and addresses removed before they're sent.
• Payment processing — a PCI-DSS certified payment processor, which handles your card details directly. We don't receive your full card number.
• Emergency response — an armed-response provider, where we have one in place for your area, which receives your identity, last known location, vehicle and trip details only when the emergency button is pressed.
• Sign-in and number verification — our authentication provider, Google Firebase, which holds your sign-in credentials, checks the identity token Apple or Google issues, and sends the one-time SMS code that verifies your mobile number.
• Sign-in providers — Apple and Google, if you choose to sign in with them. They are not our operators: each acts under its own privacy notice when you use its sign-in, and what it passes to us is described in section 2.
• Communications — the providers who send our SMS, push notifications and email.
• Maps and navigation — the mapping provider supplying routing and geocoding.
• Support and analytics tooling — the platforms our support agents and engineers use.

Retail partners

When you redeem Link Credits at a partner such as Pick n Pay or Checkers, we share only what the partner needs to honour the redemption — a voucher or credit reference and the amount. We don't give retailers your trip history, your location, or your contact details for their own marketing.

Regulators and authorities

We share where the law requires it — including with the National Public Transport Regulator, Provincial Regulatory Entities, the South African Revenue Service, the South African Police Service and the courts — where there is a valid legal instruction, or a good-faith belief that disclosure is required by law or necessary to prevent serious harm. We record every such decision and satisfy ourselves there is a lawful basis before we act.

Our group

LNK Mobility is wholly owned by Bantu Technologies Group (Pty) Ltd. We share personal information within the group only where there is a business reason to — shared finance, legal, engineering and customer support functions, and group-level reporting. Group companies handle it under the same terms set out in this notice, under written intra-group agreements, and they may not use it for their own separate purposes.

Where group-level analysis doesn't need to identify anyone, we use anonymised or aggregated data instead.

Business transactions

If Link is sold, merged or restructured, personal information may transfer to the acquiring entity. It stays subject to this notice, and we'll tell you before anything changes.

Safety, tracking and the emergency button

Safety is the reason for a lot of the information we hold, so we want to be direct about it.

• Your route is tracked for the duration of every trip, for both rider and driver. That record is what lets us reconstruct what happened if something goes wrong.
• Pressing the emergency button raises an alert with our safety team immediately, carrying your identity, the vehicle's last known location, and vehicle and trip details. Where we have an armed-response provider in place for your area we pass the same details to them, and where appropriate to the emergency services. We do this to protect your life and safety — which POPIA permits without waiting for consent.
• We may review trip and location records when investigating a complaint, an accident, or a suspected criminal offence.
• When the emergency button is pressed, we keep the evidence. We copy that trip's route, with the time of each point, and keep the in-app chat between rider and driver, for 90 days after the alert is closed — longer if an investigation, complaint or claim needs it. Closing your account in that time doesn't delete that copy. We page our on-call safety staff by SMS; the page carries only an alert reference, not your name, number or location.
• Drivers are vetted before activation by a person on our team reviewing their identity, licensing and compliance documents, and their documents are checked again when one expires. Software helps with some of the reading (section 11), but a person decides. We don't commission criminal record checks ourselves. We don't publish vetting outcomes, and a driver can ask us to explain any decision that follows from one.

Where it's stored, and transfers out of South Africa

We keep your personal information in South Africa wherever we can. Our primary Firebase database and storage are configured in the africa-south1 (Johannesburg) region.

Some of our service providers are international, and parts of their infrastructure — support tooling, backups, crash reporting, email and push delivery — may process information outside the Republic.

When that happens, section 72 of POPIA applies, and we transfer only where at least one of these is true:

• the receiving country has a law, binding corporate rules or binding agreement giving protection substantially similar to POPIA;
• there is a written agreement between us and the recipient giving that level of protection;
• the transfer is necessary to perform our contract with you, or a contract concluded in your interest; or
• you have consented to the transfer.

In practice our transfers happen under written data processing agreements with standard contractual protections. Want to know which providers process information outside South Africa and on what basis? Email privacy@getlink.co.za and we'll tell you.

How we protect it

We take the security safeguards POPIA requires under section 19, including:

• encryption of information in transit (TLS) and at rest;
• access controls, so staff only reach the information their role needs, with logging of who accessed what;
• card data handled by a PCI-DSS compliant payment processor, never stored on our systems;
• regular reviews of our infrastructure, dependencies and access lists;
• written contracts with every operator obliging them to comparable safeguards.

No system is perfectly secure, and we won't pretend otherwise. What we commit to is this: if there are reasonable grounds to believe your personal information has been accessed by someone unauthorised, we will notify the Information Regulator and we will notify you, as soon as reasonably possible after we discover it, as section 22 of POPIA requires. Our notice will describe what happened, the possible consequences, what we're doing about it, and what you should do to protect yourself.

How long we keep it

We keep information only as long as we need it. Different information has different clocks.

When you close your account we delete your personal information, except where we still need it for one of the reasons above. What we are required to keep — the record of a trip you paid for, and the invoice behind it — is stripped of anything that points back to you: your name, your number, your email address and the addresses you travelled between are all removed, and what stays is a reference that identifies the transaction but not the person.

If you haven't used your account for three years, we'll contact you to ask whether you want to keep it. If we don't hear back in a reasonable time, we'll close it and delete what we're not required to keep.

Your rights

POPIA gives you the following rights. We won't charge you for exercising them, except that we may charge the prescribed fee for a request for access to a record — and we'll tell you the amount before we do any work.

• To be told what we hold. Ask us to confirm whether we hold personal information about you, and to give you a copy or a description. Access requests are handled under the Promotion of Access to Information Act 2 of 2000; our PAIA Manual is on this website and explains the process.
• To have it corrected. If something we hold is inaccurate, irrelevant, misleading, out of date or incomplete, ask us to fix it. Much of it you can fix yourself in the app.
• To have it deleted or destroyed. Ask us to delete personal information we're no longer entitled to keep. Where we must keep something by law, we'll tell you what and why. The quickest way to delete your whole account is in the app, under your account — see section 8.
• To object to processing. Where we process on the basis of legitimate interests, or to protect your legitimate interests, you can object on reasonable grounds relating to your situation. We'll stop unless we have compelling grounds to continue.
• To object to direct marketing at any time, for any reason or none. See section 10.
• Not to be subject to a decision made only by a machine where it significantly affects you, and to ask a human to look at it. See section 11.
• To complain — to us first, and to the Information Regulator if we don't resolve it. See section 13.
• To go to court. POPIA lets you institute civil proceedings for a breach of your rights, whether or not there was intent or negligence on our part.

How to exercise a right

Email privacy@getlink.co.za, or write to our Information Officer at the address in section 1. You don't have to use a particular form — the amended POPIA Regulations let you object or request a correction by post, email, SMS or WhatsApp, or in any other convenient way. The official Form 1 (objection) and Form 2 (correction or deletion) are available from the Information Regulator if you'd rather use them.

We'll need to satisfy ourselves you are who you say you are before we act, and we'll respond within the period POPIA allows. If we correct, delete or destroy information as a result of your request, we'll confirm that to you.

There are limits. We may not be able to give you everything — for example where it would reveal another person's personal information, or where legal privilege or an ongoing investigation applies. If we decline, we'll tell you why.

Direct marketing

We'll only send you electronic marketing — email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notification or a marketing call — if:

• you have consented, which we will ask for once and only once. Say no, or say nothing, and we won't ask again and won't send you marketing. Silence is not consent, and an opt-out box is not consent; or
• you are already a Link customer, we got your contact details when you signed up or took a trip, we're marketing our own similar products or services, and you were given a clear chance to object when we collected your details and in every message since.

Every marketing message carries a free and easy way out — an unsubscribe link, a reply keyword, or the marketing toggle in your app profile. Opt out and we stop, promptly and permanently.

We may tailor marketing using how you use Link — how often you ride, when, and roughly where — so what we send is relevant rather than random. You can object to that too.

Automated decisions

Some decisions on the platform are made automatically, because a machine is faster and more consistent than a person.

• Dispatch and pricing. Which driver gets your request, and what the fare comes to, are calculated automatically from location, distance, time, traffic and demand.
• Fraud and safety flags. Automated rules flag patterns that look like fraud, payment abuse, manipulated trips or unsafe conduct — an unusual pattern of cancellations, say, or a mismatch between a route and a claimed fare.
• Warnings and suspensions. Where a flag is serious, an account may be automatically restricted or suspended while we look into it. The inputs are things like cancellation and no-show rates, ratings and complaint history, and vetting outcomes.
• Reminders. We remind you automatically before a document expires — 30, 14 and 7 days before, and on the day. They're service messages, not marketing.

Support messages Everyone

When you contact support in the app, an AI assistant may read your message and the details of the trip it is about, to sort it for our team: what it is about, how urgent it sounds, and, for fare questions, a suggested reply that a member of our team checks, edits and sends themselves. The assistant never answers you by itself and never decides a refund. Before anything is sent to it, we remove your name, phone number, email address, number plate and addresses. It runs in Google Cloud's Vertex AI in the European Union, under the same terms as the document assistant (§4.2, §6). Until you have accepted this notice in the app, we do not use the assistant on your messages.

Safety alerts Everyone

If you press SOS, our on-call safety team is alerted first. After that, an AI assistant may read the alert and the last messages of your trip chat to write a short summary for them. It does not decide anything and never contacts you or anyone in the car. Before anything is sent to it, we remove names, phone numbers, email addresses, number plates, addresses and your exact location. It runs in the same place and under the same terms as the support assistant above. Until you have accepted this notice in the app, we do not use it on your alerts.

Reading your documents Drivers

To help our compliance team check documents faster and more consistently, a document-reading assistant may read your driving licence, PrDP, vehicle licence disc, roadworthy certificate and operating licence, using Google's AI service in the European Union. It picks out what's printed — the type of document, dates and numbers — and compares that with what you entered, so a mismatch or an expiry is easy to see.

• It doesn't decide anything. It can't approve, reject, activate or suspend you. A person on our team makes every one of those decisions, and sees what the assistant found next to the document itself.
• It never reads your ID document, your profile photo or your criminal background check. Only people review those.
• Until you've seen this notice in the app and accepted it, we don't use the assistant on your documents. A person reviews them in the usual way.
• You can ask us what the assistant found on your documents, and ask a person to check anything you think it got wrong.

If an automated decision significantly affects you, you have the right to ask for a human to review it, to put your side of the story, and to have the outcome reconsidered. Contact support in the app or email privacy@getlink.co.za. We'll explain the reasoning behind the decision and the main factors that produced it.

Cookies and this website

getlink.co.za uses cookies and similar technologies.

• Strictly necessary cookies make the site work and can't be switched off.
• Analytics cookies tell us which pages people read and where they get stuck.
• Marketing cookies, if we use them, measure our campaigns.

We ask for your consent before setting anything other than strictly necessary cookies, and you can change your mind from the cookie settings link in our footer. Your browser can also block or delete cookies, though parts of the site may stop working properly.

Complaints

Come to us first. Email privacy@getlink.co.za or contact support in the app. We'd rather fix it than have you escalate, and we'll come back to you with a substantive answer.

If we don't resolve it, you can complain to the Information Regulator. They're independent of us, and their service is free.

You may also bring civil proceedings in a court of competent jurisdiction.

Children

Link is not for people under 18. You must be 18 or older to hold a Link account, whether as a rider or a driver-partner.

We don't knowingly collect personal information from children, and if we discover we have, we'll delete it. A parent or guardian who believes we hold their child's information should email privacy@getlink.co.za.

Children may of course travel with an adult account holder. We don't collect information about passengers who aren't the account holder.

Changes to this notice

Data protection is not static and neither is our business. We'll update this notice as we change what we do.

When we make a material change — a new purpose, a new category of recipient, a new transfer out of the country — we'll tell you before it takes effect, by email or in-app notice, and we'll update the version number and effective date at the top. Smaller corrections we'll simply publish.

The current version always lives at getlink.co.za/privacy and in the Settings section of both the Link and Link Driver apps. Previous versions are available on request.