Who I am
I'm Erene Mitchell, a counsellor and registered social worker in private practice at 13 Livingstone Street, Fairmount, Johannesburg, South Africa (SACSSP 10-27663). For the purposes of POPIA and the GDPR, I am the responsible party / data controller for information collected through this site. You can reach me about anything in this notice at erene@erenemitchell.com.
The contact form
If you use the contact form, I receive: your name, email address, phone number if you give it, roughly where you are, whether you'd prefer in-person or online sessions, and whatever you choose to write in the message box. Please don't include sensitive personal detail in the form — a sentence about what brings you is plenty; everything else belongs in a conversation, not a web form.
The form is protected against spam by Cloudflare Turnstile. Your message travels over an encrypted connection to an automation service I use (n8n, self-hosted on a server in Germany operated by my website administrator), which emails it to me and sends you a short confirmation.
Your enquiry is also saved to a private database on that same server in Germany, so that I have one reliable place to see who has written to me and whether I have replied. It is reachable only through a password-protected page, and only I and my website administrator can open it. It is never used for marketing, never shared, and never sold.
What I do with an enquiry
I use your details to reply to you — nothing else. No marketing lists, no newsletters, no sharing with anyone. I keep enquiries for as long as I am in practice, so that if you write to me again years from now I have the thread of it; but you can ask me to delete yours at any time and I will. Anything you later share with me as a client is governed by professional confidentiality, which is stricter than any privacy law; clinical information never touches this website, its forms, or its analytics.
WhatsApp and email
If you contact me by WhatsApp or email, those services' own terms apply to the transmission. WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted; email generally is not. Share only what you're comfortable sharing in each medium — the substance of our work belongs in sessions.
Analytics and cookies
This site uses Google Analytics to understand, in aggregate, which pages people find useful — but only if you accept the cookie banner. If you decline (or ignore it), no analytics cookies are set. Analytics data is anonymised at the IP level and tells me things like "many people read the grief page"; it cannot tell me who you are.
Where information lives
- Website hosting: a server in Germany (Hetzner, EU) operated by my website administrator.
- Form handling: n8n (self-hosted, same German server) and Brevo (EU-based email service) for the confirmation email.
- Enquiry records: a private database on that same German server, reachable only through a password-protected page.
- Email: routed via Cloudflare and delivered to my practice mailbox.
Your rights
Under POPIA and the GDPR you may ask me, at any time: what information I hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it. Email erene@erenemitchell.com and it will be done within a month, usually much sooner. If you are in South Africa and believe I've handled your information badly, you may complain to the Information Regulator (inforegulator.org.za); in the UK or EU, to your local supervisory authority. I would rather you told me first, so I can put it right.
Changes
If this notice changes materially, the date below will change with it.