Privacy Policy

Last updated: 29 September 2026

BusinessWorld.com.my is a directory of Malaysian businesses. It is run by Surf Seven Network (200203092812) of Butterworth, Penang, Malaysia — “we” and “us” below. This policy says what personal data we collect, what we do with it, and what you can do about it. It is written to meet the Personal Data Protection Act 2010.

What we collect

Business details, which are published. The business name, description, website, phone and WhatsApp numbers, address, state, logo and categories. These appear on the listing’s public page, and search engines may show them. For a sole proprietor some of these can be personal data, so give only contact details you are content for the public to see.

Your contact details, which are not published. The email address a listing is submitted with, and your name if you give it. Neither is ever shown on the site.

SSM registration documents. Only if you upload one, to have a listing verified or to claim a listing. The document is stored privately and is never shown on the site. When a listing is verified, its SSM registration number is shown on its page.

Payment records. If you pay for a featured listing, the payment is taken by HitPay, our payment provider. We never see or store your card or bank details. We keep a record of the order: the listing, the number of months, the amount, the date, the payment reference, and the payer’s name and email address as HitPay reports them.

Technical data. When you use one of our forms we read your IP address to limit abuse. We store it only as a salted hash, not as the address itself. The companies that host the site keep ordinary server logs. We set no advertising or tracking cookies.

Listings from the earlier directory. Many listings were carried over from the previous BusinessWorld directory, together with the contact email each was registered with. Their owners can claim them, correct them or tell us the business has closed.

What we use it for

To publish the listing and keep it accurate.
To send the emails the service depends on: the link that confirms a listing, the links to edit, renew or claim it, and the results of our checks.
To check a listing before it is published and when it changes. The checks are partly automated: the details you submit, the business’s own website and any SSM document are read by an AI service, and a person decides whenever the automated check is unsure.
To verify a business against its SSM registration.
To take payment for featured listings and keep the records the law requires.
To prevent spam, duplicate listings and abuse.
To send you important announcements about the directory, and marketing about our own services. See the next section.

Announcements and marketing

We will not sell your contact details to any third party. We may use them ourselves, to send you important announcements and marketing about BusinessWorld.com.my and the other services of Surf Seven Network.

You can ask us to stop sending marketing at any time by writing to [email protected]. Emails that the service needs in order to work, such as renewal reminders, are still sent for as long as your listing is on the site.

We share personal data only with the companies that help us run the service, and only as far as each needs it: website hosting, the database, file storage, email delivery, the AI service that helps check listings and documents, the messaging service that alerts our moderator, and HitPay for payments. Some of them store or process data outside Malaysia, including in Singapore and the United States.

We may also disclose personal data where the law requires it.

The published details of a listing are, by their nature, available to anyone who visits the site.

How long we keep it

A listing and the contact details behind it: for as long as it is on the site, and afterwards, so that it can be restored and so that a listing we removed is not simply submitted again.
SSM documents: for as long as we hold the listing, as the evidence behind the Verified badge. A file that was uploaded but never sent with a form is deleted after 48 hours.
Links we email: they stop working within hours or days, and our record of them is deleted about 30 days later.
Technical data: the hashed IP address of whoever submitted a listing is kept with it. The records used to limit repeated requests are deleted after two days.
Payment records: seven years, as tax and accounting law requires.

Your choices and your rights

Correct a listing yourself, at any time: ask for an edit link at businessworld.com.my/edit.
Ask what personal data we hold about you, and have it corrected.
Have a listing removed, along with the contact details behind it.
Stop marketing emails, without affecting your listing.

Giving us personal data is voluntary. But we cannot publish a listing without the business name, a way to contact the business, and an email address to confirm the listing with.

To use any of these rights, write to [email protected]. We may need to confirm that you are the person the data is about, and we answer within 21 days.

How we protect it

Private details are kept apart from the public website, which can read published listings and nothing else. SSM documents are held in private storage. The links we email work once, expire, and are stored only as hashes. No system is perfectly secure, but we will tell you, and the authorities where the law requires it, if a breach puts your data at risk.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the new version is published on this page with a new date at the top. If a change is significant, we also tell listing owners by email.

Contact

Surf Seven Network (200203092812)
Butterworth, Penang, Malaysia
Email: [email protected]