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Last updated: 28 May 2026. Governing law: Republic of South Africa.

This page consolidates the terms of use, acceptable use policy, privacy practice, Atlas data licence, dispute and correction procedures, disclaimers, and limitations of liability that apply to the tech.africa website and all services published at the tech.africa domain, including the Africa Internet Atlas (the “Atlas”) and our public API at atlas-api.tech.africa.

By accessing or using the site you accept these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the site.

1. Acceptance and scope

These terms govern all visitors, registered users, API consumers, advertisers, sponsors, and operators whose organisations appear in the Atlas. If you act on behalf of an organisation you confirm you have authority to bind that organisation. References to “we”, “us”, “our” and “the publisher” mean tech.africa. Headings are for navigation; the substance of each clause governs.

2. Editorial content

tech.africa is an editorial publication. Articles are produced by editorial staff and contributors and represent the publisher’s good-faith view at the date of publication. They are not subsequently updated to reflect later developments unless materially in error (see §10). Sponsored content is labelled visibly per §7.

3. Africa Internet Atlas: data and licence

The Atlas is a structured reference layer for African internet infrastructure, combining (i) ingestion from public sources under each source’s licence (AFRINIC, IANA, RouteViews under CC BY 4.0, ICANN accredited registrar lists, and other public sources cited per entity); (ii) tech.africa editorial overlay and verification; and (iii) derived metrics and measurements, with any measurement partners disclosed on the methodology page.

Licence: open data layer

The Atlas open-data layer (the public entity pages at /atlas/*, the JSON-LD Dataset blocks, and the unauthenticated /v1/search endpoint) is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, transform, and build on the data, including for commercial purposes, provided you:

  1. Attribute “tech.africa Atlas” with a link to the entity URL or to the Atlas section of tech.africa;
  2. Indicate any changes you have made; and
  3. Do not imply endorsement by tech.africa or its partners.

Commercial API access

When a commercial API tier is offered, bulk data access, derived datasets, training of machine-learning models on Atlas data at scale, and any high-volume programmatic use will require a separate commercial agreement. The unauthenticated /v1/search endpoint is provided for individual lookup and small-volume citation use only. Contact us via the contact page to discuss commercial interest.

What the Atlas licence does not cover

  • Third-party trademarks, logos, photographs, and names of organisations and individuals appearing in entity pages.
  • Atlas editorial prose at the page level, which remains copyright tech.africa and is licensed only under the limited journalistic-quotation conventions in §13.
  • Sponsored entity profile content, which is licensed separately by the sponsor.
  • Measurement data provided by named measurement partners: attribution must additionally include the attribution string disclosed on the methodology page (for example, “Measurements sponsored by AFRICLOUD” when that partnership is in effect).
  • The tech.africa wordmark, the “Africa Internet Atlas” name, and associated visual identity, which are common-law (unregistered) trade marks of the publisher and protected under South African passing-off principles.

4. Acceptable use

You may access and use the site for reasonable personal, educational, journalistic, research, and commercial purposes consistent with these terms. The following are prohibited:

  • Automated access that ignores robots.txt, exceeds 1 request per second per source IP, or fails to set a meaningful User-Agent identifying you and a contact URL.
  • Scraping, mirroring, or republishing Atlas data in any way inconsistent with the licence in §3.
  • Reverse-engineering, decompiling, or attempting to access non-public parts of any service, including authenticated API endpoints, the administrative surface, or systems hosted at atlas-api.tech.africa.
  • Use of the site to harass any individual or organisation, to publish defamatory material, or to violate any law.
  • Misrepresenting yourself as a tech.africa staff member, contributor, sponsor, or partner.
  • Use of automated systems to submit, manipulate, or game user-generated content where permitted, or to inflate referral, social, search, advertising, or measurement signals.
  • Any use that imposes an unreasonable load on the site or interferes with its normal operation, including denial-of-service or volumetric attack of any kind.

API users additionally agree to the rate limits, attribution requirements, and acceptable-use clauses published with their API credentials. We reserve the right to revoke credentials and block IP addresses for breach.

User-generated content

Where comments, submissions, or other user-generated content is enabled, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide licence to use, reproduce, edit, translate, and distribute your contribution on the site and in associated editorial outputs. You retain underlying copyright in your contribution and warrant that you have the right to grant this licence. We may moderate, edit, or delete contributions at our discretion. Defamatory, infringing, or unlawful contributions will be removed.

5. Privacy

We collect only the data necessary to operate the site, secure it, and improve it.

  • Server logs. Standard request logs (IP, user agent, requested URL, referrer, timestamp) processed through Cloudflare’s CDN and WAF for security and performance, retained for up to 90 days for security and abuse investigation.
  • Analytics. Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and Jetpack Stats measure traffic in aggregate. We do not use cross-session identifiable data for our own advertising profiles.
  • Advertising. Display advertising via Google AdSense and our own house-ad system. Google AdSense may set its own cookies under Google’s policies.
  • Contact form. When you submit our contact form we collect the data you provide (name, email, message) and a network-profile snapshot (IP, country, device, browser, OS, screen, timezone, time-on-form) used for spam classification. Retained for the duration of the editorial correspondence and a reasonable archival period. Not sold or shared with third parties for marketing.
  • Newsletter. If we offer a newsletter and you subscribe, we use your email solely to send it. Unsubscribe at any time via the link in every email.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 18 years of age. Under POPIA section 34, the processing of a child’s personal information is prohibited unless one of the prescribed grounds applies, including consent from a competent person. If you become aware that a child under 18 has provided us personal information without consent, please contact us and we will delete it.

Your rights

Under the South African Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA) and equivalent statutes in other African jurisdictions including the Nigerian Data Protection Act 2023, you have the right to:

  • Request access to the personal information we hold about you.
  • Request correction of inaccurate information.
  • Request deletion, subject to our legal retention obligations.
  • Object to processing for direct-marketing purposes.

If you access this site from the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction with an equivalent data-protection law, the rights listed above are honoured under your local statute (GDPR, UK GDPR, or equivalent).

Send requests via our contact page. We respond within 30 calendar days, matching the statutory period under POPIA section 23. The publisher acts as Information Officer in terms of POPIA and is reachable via the contact page; complaints may also be referred to the South African Information Regulator at inforegulator.org.za.

6. Cookies and tracking

The site uses cookies for: (i) strictly-necessary session, security, and bot-detection cookies, including Cloudflare’s __cf_bm and cf_clearance; (ii) analytics (Google Analytics 4, Jetpack Stats); and (iii) advertising (Google AdSense). You may opt out of Google advertising cookies at adssettings.google.com or via your browser’s privacy controls. Refusing cookies may impair some features.

7. Advertising and sponsored content

Display advertising is served by Google AdSense and by our own ad system. Advertisers do not influence editorial coverage. Where we publish sponsored content, sponsored Atlas entity profiles, or any commercial advertorial, they are labelled visibly as “Sponsored” or “Sponsored profile”.

Editorial independence is non-negotiable. Sponsors have no advance-review rights on news coverage and no approval rights on Atlas data. A sponsorship arrangement does not buy positive editorial treatment and does not grant any right to suppress critical reporting. Atlas sponsor agreements explicitly preserve our editorial discretion to remove or downgrade any entity that fails verification or is the subject of credible material concerns.

8. Atlas editorial standards

Every Atlas entity carries a verified_at timestamp indicating the last manual editorial review. Source priority on conflict, in descending order: manual editorial > operator self-publication > AFRINIC delegated-extended stats > ICANN accredited registrar list > tech.africa-derived triangulation > regional IX exchange data (AF-IX) > ManyPossibilities cable data > bgp.tools > Wikidata > IANA. Where any sponsorship arrangements apply, they are disclosed on the affected entity page along with any sponsor-supplied editorial overlay. Re-verification cadence: top-50 entities every 90 days, others every 180 days.

9. Operator and subject workflow

If you are the operator or representative of an organisation, facility, IXP, network, cable, registrar, or TLD that appears in the Atlas, you may submit a request via the contact page. Categories and service-level commitments:

  • Correction (factual update): acknowledgement within 48 hours; decision within 10 business days; implementation within 5 business days of decision.
  • Dispute (contested attribution or interpretation): same SLA as correction; resolution recorded in the entity revision history.
  • Removal request: subject to public-interest balance; not automatic.
  • Material concern (legal, regulatory, safety): routed to editorial leadership; up to 20 business days for complex matters.

We preserve editorial discretion in all four paths. Removal of accurate, sourced content is not granted simply on operator request; we balance accuracy, public interest, source transparency, and the right of reply.

10. Right of reply and corrections

If you believe content published on tech.africa misrepresents you, your organisation, or the facts:

  1. Send a written correction request via the contact page identifying the URL, the contested passage, and the proposed correction with supporting source.
  2. Editorial acknowledges within 48 hours and decides within 10 business days.
  3. Where a correction is warranted we publish it on the same article in a clearly labelled correction note. Where editorial judges the original is supported, we may publish a right-of-reply statement of up to 200 words alongside the article.

This process is in addition to, and not in substitution for, your statutory rights.

11. Take-down requests and intellectual property

If you believe content on the site infringes your copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right, send a written notice via the contact page identifying the work, the infringing URL, your authority to act, and your contact details. We act on credible notices in line with the South African Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 and equivalent statutes. We may republish content removed in error following a counter-notice. Frivolous, abusive, or bad-faith take-down requests are not actioned and may be publicly recorded.

12. Third-party services and links

The site links to and embeds third-party services (Google services, social platforms, source-attribution links). We do not control those services and accept no responsibility for their content, availability, or policies. Your use of a third-party service is governed by that service’s own terms.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

The site, the Atlas, and all data published under it are provided “as is” and “as available”. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and uninterrupted availability. In particular:

  • Atlas data is editorial best-effort, not a legal record. Do not use Atlas data as the sole basis for legal, regulatory, financial, due-diligence, contractual, or operational decisions. Verify against the cited primary source and consult qualified professional advice where consequence warrants.
  • Measurement data (latency, traceroute, BGP-adjacency, and similar) reflects a finite set of vantage points at the time of measurement. It does not represent the full state of any network or of the internet.
  • Editorial articles represent the publisher’s view at publication date and may not reflect subsequent developments. Statements attributed to interview subjects, press releases, or third parties are reported in good faith but are not endorsed.
  • Third-party data carries the warranties (or lack thereof) of its original source. Our presentation of third-party data does not enlarge those warranties.

14. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

  • Our total aggregate liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to your use of the site, the Atlas, or any service we provide shall not exceed the amount you have paid us in the twelve months preceding the claim, or ZAR 1,000, whichever is higher.
  • We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, including lost profits, lost data, business interruption, loss of goodwill, or loss of opportunity, even if we have been advised of the possibility.
  • We are not liable for losses arising from your reliance on Atlas data, editorial content, third-party data or services linked from the site, or any commercial decision you take on the basis of either.
  • Nothing in this section limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for fraud, wilful misconduct, or death or personal injury caused by negligence.

15. Indemnification

If you use the site, the Atlas, or our API in breach of these terms, including by misattributing Atlas data, infringing third-party rights, exceeding licensed-use scope, or violating the acceptable-use provisions in §4, you agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, damages, and reasonable legal costs arising from that breach.

16. Governing law and dispute resolution

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules.

Before commencing litigation, you agree to first attempt good-faith resolution by contacting editorial leadership via the contact page and giving us 30 calendar days to respond. Where resolution is not reached, the dispute is referred to mediation under the rules of the Arbitration Foundation of Southern Africa (AFSA). Litigation, if any, is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the High Court of South Africa, Gauteng Local Division (Johannesburg), to which both parties consent.

17. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. The “Last updated” date at the top is authoritative. Material changes are announced on the site and, where you are a registered user or API consumer, by email, with at least 14 calendar days’ notice before they take effect. Continued use after the effective date is acceptance of the updated terms.

18. Severability and entire agreement

If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest remains in full effect and the unenforceable provision is to be read down only to the extent necessary. These terms together with the Atlas editorial standards summarised in §8 and any commercial agreement you have signed with us form the entire agreement between you and us in respect of the subject matter.

19. Contact

For all legal correspondence, privacy requests, take-down notices, Atlas operator queries, sponsor enquiries, and dispute initiation: please use our contact page. We do not publish raw email addresses on this site to reduce spam and phishing exposure; the contact form routes legal correspondence directly to editorial leadership.