PRIVACY POLICY

Nobody reads these. We wrote a good one anyway.

We run murder mysteries for a living, so we have a professional interest in who knows what about whom. It would be a bit rich to spend our evenings staging elaborate secrets and then be careless with yours.

So this page says – in plain English, because the alternative is four pages of Latin nobody finishes – what we collect, why, who else sees it, and how to make us stop.

Last updated: 13 August 2026. It applies to this website and to emails between us.

What we collect

Things you hand us. You give us these when you fill in a form, make a booking, or come to a show; Your name, email address, phone number, and whatever you tell us about your event – group size, dates, the province you’re in.

Things your computer mentions in passing. Every website gets this whether it wants to or not; it arrives with the request, like a postmark. That’s your IP address, browser, rough location, what time you visited and which page sent you here.

What we deliberately don’t collect. Anything about your private life, race, religion, politics or health. It’s none of our business.

What we do with it

We use it to answer you, quote you, and run your event. That’s the bulk of it.

An enquiry is not a newsletter subscription. If you email us for a quote, you get a quote. You only go on our mailing list if you actually asked to, and one click gets you off it again. We think doing it the other way round – quietly converting a quote request into a daily newsletter – is rude, and we don’t do it.

We may occasionally ask what you thought of a show, because even 3 decades into our business, we’re always trying to improve.

How we work out where you came from

This is the part most privacy policies mumble, so here it is properly.

We advertise, mostly on Google. When somebody arrives from an ad and then sends an enquiry, we’d like to know which ad did the work – because the alternative is guessing, and guessing with an advertising budget is a reliable way for a small company to spend a great deal of money on nothing.

Here’s exactly what happens. When you submit an enquiry, our website takes the email address you typed and scrambles it. The scramble is one-way: it turns your address into a long string of characters that can’t be unscrambled back into your address, not even by Google. We send that scrambled string to Google, along with the fact that an enquiry happened. Google checks it against its own scrambled list and tells us either “yes, that scrambled egg came from the ad you paid for” or tells us nothing at all.

Google never tells us who you are. In other words, it’s not about who you are, it’s about ‘who’ the advert was.

What we don’t do with it. We don’t sell your details, rent them, or lease them to anybody. We don’t send Google your actual name or email address. And we don’t use any of this to follow you around the internet showing you murder mystery ads for six months. That’s a different, more annoying business and we’re not in it.

The legal basis, since somebody will ask. We rely on legitimate interest under POPIA – ours in not wasting money, and yours in us still being here when your event comes round. If you’d rather we left you out of it, just say so using the form at the bottom of this page and we’ll exclude you. No argument, no retention specialist phoning you back.

Cookies

A cookie is a small text file our site leaves on your device. It can’t run programs or carry viruses. Some of ours are ours; some belong to Google, who help us with the counting described above.

We use them to remember you between pages – and, more to the point, to remember which case is yours. During an event, this site hands out invitations, case files and clues, and it uses cookies to work out which ones belong to you.

You can switch cookies off in your browser, and you’re entitled to. But it’s worth knowing what it costs: a browser on a cookie detox is a browser that can’t tell which case file is yours, and missing the vital clue on the night because of a privacy setting is a genuinely annoying way to lose a murder investigation.

Who else sees your information

A short list, because it is a short list.

Suppliers who help us run the business — the people who host this website, send our email, and process payments. They’re only allowed to use your information to do that job for us, and nothing else.

Google, just for counting as described above.

Anybody a court tells us to. If we’re legally obliged to hand something over, we will, because the alternative is contempt of court and our insurance doesn’t cover that.

That’s the whole list. No data brokers, no mailing-list resellers, no dictators.

Where it goes. Some of these companies – Google included – process information on computers outside South Africa. POPIA lets us do this where the recipient is bound by comparable protections, and their contracts with us commit them to exactly that.

How long we keep it

Seven years. Partly because SARS requires record keeping for anything with money attached, and partly because people genuinely do come back saying “we spoke about a year-end function once,” and it’s embarrassing to have no record of the conversation.

Your rights, which are real and not decorative

Under POPIA you can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you (hint: it’s basically just the email conversations we’ve had)
• correct anything wrong
• delete it, where we’re not legally required to keep it
• stop using it for working out which of our ads are worthwhile, which is really just about the advert and not about you.
• stop emailing you, ever, about anything

Use the form at the bottom of this page. We’ll deal with it within 30 days, and usually a great deal sooner, because it’s rarely complicated.

If we’ve handled something badly and you’d like to go over our heads, you’re entitled to complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa at inforegulator.org.za. We’d genuinely rather you told us first and gave us the chance to fix it.

Keeping it safe

Your information sits on secured servers, and anything sensitive travels encrypted between your browser and ours.

We’ll be straight with you: no website on earth is unbreakable, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What we can promise is that we take it seriously, we don’t keep what we don’t need, and if something ever did go wrong we’d tell you and the Regulator rather than hoping nobody noticed.

Who’s responsible

Our Information Officer is Kenneth Collett, who is accountable for everything on this page.

Reach him – or anyone here – using the form below, or on 011 264 0018. We’ve deliberately not put personal mobile numbers on a public website, for reasons this page has hopefully made obvious.

Changes

We’ll update this when what we do changes, and we’ll change the date at the top when we do.