Media Enquiries

Who we are

Our website address is: https://bigambitions.co.za.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

Chat assistant (Biggie)

Our media centre at media.bigambitions.co.za offers a chat assistant, “Biggie”, that answers questions using the press releases we publish on behalf of our clients. When you use it, we process:

We use this information to answer your questions, to prevent abuse and control costs (for example, by limiting the number of questions per chat and per day), and to understand which topics journalists and travellers are interested in so that we can improve our press materials.

Answers are generated automatically by an artificial intelligence (AI) model from our press releases and may contain mistakes. Please check the linked press release, or contact us, before relying on or publishing an answer. Please do not enter personal or confidential information (such as ID numbers, health or financial details) in the chat.

The chat remembers your conversation only in your browser tab (session storage), which is cleared when you close the tab. The chat assistant does not set any cookies.

Talking to Biggie by voice

If you choose “Talk to Biggie”, your browser asks for permission to use your microphone. Your voice is sent to ElevenLabs (Eleven Labs, Inc., United States), which converts it to text, generates Biggie’s spoken reply and returns the audio. We do not record or keep audio of your voice. ElevenLabs keeps a text transcript of the voice conversation, which we use in the same way as chat questions (to answer you, prevent abuse and improve our press materials). Voice chats are limited in length and number per day. You can end a voice chat at any time, or simply type instead.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Questions and answers from the chat assistant are kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically. Voice chat transcripts are stored by ElevenLabs until we delete them.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

This also applies to questions you asked our chat assistant. Because we do not store your name or IP address, please tell us roughly when you used the chat and what you asked, so that we can find your conversation.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Questions you ask the chat assistant are sent to OpenRouter (OpenRouter, Inc., United States), which passes them to the AI model provider that generates the answer (currently Google’s Gemini models). Our press releases are also processed by an AI embedding service (currently OpenAI) through OpenRouter so that the assistant can search them. This means your question is processed outside South Africa. We send only the text of your question, your recent messages in the same chat and extracts from our press releases, never your name, email address or IP address. These providers process the data to return answers to us, in line with their own privacy terms.

Voice conversations with the chat assistant are processed by ElevenLabs (Eleven Labs, Inc., United States), which transcribes your speech, generates spoken answers and stores the conversation transcript on our behalf. The transcript and your spoken words are processed outside South Africa. We do not send ElevenLabs your name, email address or IP address; ElevenLabs necessarily receives your voice and the technical connection data needed to stream audio to your browser.

Your contact information

Old Warehouse Building,

Central Block Black River,

Parkway Observatory,

Cape Town​

(083)4494334

info@bigambitions.co.za