Privacy & Safety

Custom Artificial Intelligence Solutions (Pty) Ltd (trading as Custom AI Solutions), company registration 2016/377651/07, which operates Nostoi.ai, is the responsible party for your personal information. Our Information Officer is Steven Glyn Johnstone, registered with the Information Regulator (South Africa) (certificate 2026-061119). Our address is Highwick Drive, Kenilworth, Cape Town, 7708. Reach the Information Officer at privacy@nostoi.ai (or steven@themodelexplained.co.za), by telephone on 082 336 3759, or through the Contact channel published on Nostoi.ai.

Nostoi uses automated systems, including AI providers, to understand your search, find listings, work out match indicators, and draft explanations. Important listing facts come from identified data sources. The AI does not make a binding decision about whether you qualify for a property, credit, or insurance.

Results are ordered for your specific search. We do not keep one master ranking of properties. Paid placement is clearly labelled and does not raise a property's match score or push an unsuitable property at you.

The table below lists what we process, who handles it, whether it leaves South Africa, and how long we keep it. Items marked “Yes” under “Leaves SA?” are processed by providers outside the country under contracts that require appropriate protection — including AI processing that happens in the United States.

We keep your chat for up to 90 days after your last message so we can continue the conversation, keep the service secure, investigate abuse or fraud, handle complaints or disputes, and review conversations to improve the service (never to train AI models on them). After that, we remove it from our active systems. Some information may stay a little longer in our encrypted backups, which are cleared on a regular cycle, and in our AI providers' short-term logs. Where we are handling a complaint, a safety matter, or a legal claim, we may keep a small relevant extract for as long as needed. We also keep a short, non-readable technical marker (explained below). We do not keep readable copies of your chats beyond what is described here.

After a chat is deleted, we may keep a short, non-readable cryptographic fingerprint for up to three years. It helps us check whether a transcript someone later produces in a complaint or dispute matches the original. It cannot be used to read or rebuild your conversation.

We save a preference across sessions only when you turn the feature on and the information is shown to you or clearly requested. You can view, correct, and delete saved memories. We do not deliberately guess or save sensitive life circumstances just because your activity might hint at them.

You never need to share medical, family, financial or safety details to use Nostoi. If you choose to mention a sensitive circumstance, Nostoi will use it only within that conversation — to respond respectfully, to avoid asking you to repeat it, to turn it into a property requirement you've asked for, or to offer an optional official support resource. It is never stored as a label about you, never used to rank properties, assess eligibility, set prices, market to you, or train our systems. Sensitive content is handled on a restricted, adults-only path and is not written into ordinary logs.

We may share the smallest amount of information needed if South African law requires us to report something, or if it is lawfully necessary to protect someone's life or safety. A trained person checks the situation before we report — except where the law requires us to act immediately. We do not promise that everything you tell us stays private in these situations.

If you ask Nostoi to introduce you to an estate agency about selling your current property, Nostoi may send that agency your name, contact details, broad property location, property type, and intended timeframe. Nostoi will not send your full chat, financial profile, saved properties, or sensitive personal information. The agency then uses your information as an independent responsible party under its own privacy notice. This is optional, doesn't affect your property search, and you can withdraw before the introduction is sent.

If you use Nostoi chat, the messages you choose to send may include property-search circumstances, such as whether you may need to sell an existing home before buying. We may process those messages through offshore commercial AI API providers to generate responses. Under their API terms, those providers may temporarily retain inputs and outputs for security, service-integrity or abuse-monitoring purposes, and API inputs are not used to train their models by default. Nostoi does not create a seller lead or store your sale-dependency as a profile, buyer memory or advisory input before your express opt-in, other than a minimal, reason-free, purpose-limited marker used only to avoid repeating the same offer.

Nostoi's personalised property tools are for people aged 18 or older. You can browse public listings at any age, but you can't create an account, use personalised chat, save personal information, send an enquiry, or ask for an introduction unless you confirm you are 18 or older.

For this check we record only that you confirmed you are 18 or older, with the date and the policy version — we do not collect identity documents or your date of birth for it.

If you use the agent or agency portal, the table above also covers you: the acceptance records made when you accept the Commercial Terms or the Nostoi Pro Code of Conduct, your subscription and standing records (introduction outcomes, strikes and appeals, listing-quality scores and their explanations, pauses and lifts), and introduction records. These exist for contract, security, fraud-prevention, audit and dispute purposes only — they are never used to influence advisory content or paid-placement outputs, and conduct records survive cancellation or termination as the Commercial Terms state.

If your personal information is ever compromised in a way the law treats as a breach, we will notify the Information Regulator and affected people as soon as reasonably possible, as section 22 of POPIA requires, and we will tell you plainly what happened and what we are doing about it.

You can access, correct, or delete your personal information — most of it directly in your account (your profile, consent history, saved memories, saved searches, and account deletion). You can object to processing, withdraw consent in your preferences, and complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) (inforegulator.org.za · 010 023 5200 · complaints: PAIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za (PAIA) / POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za (POPIA) · general: enquiries@inforegulator.org.za). Marketing, if we ever offer it, needs its own separate opt-in and an easy opt-out in every message; we never use sensitive or advisory information for marketing.

For buyers and sellers, we make no decision with a legal or similarly significant effect on you by automated means alone — the adviser helps, a human transacts. Parts of Nostoi Pro Membership administration do run on published automated rules (introduction deadlines and listing-quality scoring): every deduction is explained with the exact fix named, every strike can be appealed to a human once, a factual error in a score can be reported and corrected from the dashboard at any time, and a pause always lifts automatically when its cause resolves.

We may update these pages as the platform develops. The effective date above shows the current version; material changes will be signposted on the platform before they take effect.