Privacy, plainly.

Last updated 27 July 2026 · Applies to essentialist.co.za

Essentialist is a directory. The whole job is showing public business information to people looking for it, so we hold as little personal data as we can and this page stays short enough to read.

What we collect

Three kinds of people use this site, and we hold a different amount about each.

  • People looking for someone.Nothing that names you. You do not need an account to search, to read reviews, or to get a practitioner’s contact details. Page views are counted without identifying you, so we can tell which suburbs need more practitioners.
  • Reviewers. Your name as you type it, your email address so we can check the review is from a real person, and the review itself.
  • Listed practitioners. The business details you give us for your public listing, and your email address for signing in. We never store a password, because we never ask for one.

How we use it

To run the index: showing listings, ranking them by their reviews, emailing you a sign-in link when you ask for one, and telling a practitioner when a review lands. We do not sell data, we do not run third-party advertising trackers, and we do not build profiles of visitors.

Contact details

A practitioner’s phone number, WhatsApp and email are not written into the page. They are fetched when you press the button that asks for them, which does two things: it keeps the details away from the scrapers that harvest directories, and it lets us tell the practitioner honestly how many people actually asked. We count that press. We do not record who you are when you make it.

Reviews

Reviews are public and carry the name the reviewer gave. To keep ratings honest, one person counts once towards a listing’s score however many times they review it, and a fresh listing with two glowing reviews does not outrank an established one with sixteen good ones. If you wrote a review and want it gone, email us from the address you used and it goes.

Who else sees it

Public listing content is public; that is the entire point of a directory. Beyond that, data only reaches the services that keep the site running: our host, our email delivery provider, and our payment provider for paid plans. Card details go straight to the payment provider and never touch our servers.

Your rights

Under POPIA you may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. One email does any of those. Practitioners can also export their listing and their reviews at any time from the dashboard.

Cookies

One cookie remembers that you are signed in. One remembers whether you chose the light or the dark theme. That is the whole list, which is why there is no consent banner: there is nothing here to consent to.

Reaching us

Questions, corrections and nominations go to hello@essentialist.co.za. A person reads it, usually the same day.