Privacy Policy

The responsible party is Marius Wannenburg, South Africa. Our Information Officer is Adcam Ai and can be reached at Adcam Ai · privacy@example.com. Send all privacy questions, access requests, objections and complaints to that address.

Neighbourhood admins who set up a watch group in the app act as operators under our instruction for the member and incident data of their own neighbourhood.

• Account and profile information: name or display name, email address, optional phone number, and your street or street address.
• Membership information: which neighbourhood you belong to, your role, your status, and your join request including the address, unit or complex, optional phone number, any note you write, and an optional map pin of your home.
• Incident reports: crime type, date and time, severity, description, whether police were called, any case number, the exact coordinates you pin, a derived masked coordinate, and the address or street name you enter.
• Photographs you attach to reports. Embedded metadata, including GPS coordinates and camera details, is stripped before storage.
• Community activity: comments, corroborations, safety alerts you publish, patrol sign-ups, attendance check-ins and emergency contact entries you create as an admin.
• Consent records: the version of the Terms and this Policy you accepted, when you accepted, and your choices on location, image and contact-sharing consent.
• Technical information needed to run the service securely, such as authentication session data and error logs.

Reports and photographs may contain personal information about other people, and details of alleged criminal behaviour, which POPIA treats as special personal information. We process that category only where POPIA allows it, including for the establishment, exercise or defence of a right in law and for the legitimate interest of protecting the safety of residents and their property.

• To create and secure your account, and to give you access to your neighbourhood — necessary to perform our agreement with you.
• To let residents record, view and discuss incidents in their own area, and to produce statistics, trends and hotspot analysis — our and your legitimate interest in community safety.
• To let neighbourhood admins verify that a join request comes from a genuine resident — legitimate interest, plus your consent to share your address.
• To send in-app notifications about incidents, alerts, patrol reminders and join decisions — necessary to perform the service you asked for.
• To use your GPS location or map pin, to store photographs that may show other people, and to show your name, phone number and street to fellow members and admins — your separate, optional consent for each.
• To keep records of Terms and Policy acceptance, to moderate abuse, and to comply with the law — compliance with a legal obligation and legitimate interest.

Where we rely on your consent, you may withdraw it at any time in the app under Legal and consents, or by contacting the Information Officer. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that already lawfully took place, and some features stop working without it.

• Active members of your neighbourhood can see reports according to the audience the reporter chose, and can see the reporter's name unless the report was submitted anonymously or your admin has disabled reporter visibility.
• Moderators and admins of your neighbourhood can additionally see moderator-only reports, member contact details, join requests and moderation history for their neighbourhood only.
• The public, including people who are not signed in, can see only what your admin has enabled for the public suburb page: coarse statistics and street-level or approximate locations. Exact addresses and exact coordinates are never released outside active membership; that masking happens on our servers.
• Platform super administrators can see neighbourhood and administrator lists for support and abuse handling.
• We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.

We use these processors to run the service: our cloud hosting and database provider, which stores accounts, reports and photographs and sends authentication email; and Google Maps Platform, which renders maps and processes coordinates you view or pin. These providers may process data outside South Africa. Section 72 of POPIA permits such transfers where the recipient is bound by binding agreements and safeguards providing an adequate level of protection, which our contracts with these providers require.

• Access is controlled by authenticated accounts and per-row database access rules, so a member can only retrieve the records their neighbourhood role and the report's audience allow.
• Data is encrypted in transit, and stored data is encrypted at rest by our hosting provider.
• Photographs are stored in a private bucket that is not publicly listable or readable, and are re-encoded to strip location and camera metadata before upload.
• Exact coordinates are masked server-side for anyone who is not entitled to see them.
• Administrative actions and patrol attendance changes are logged.

No system is completely secure. If a security compromise affects your personal information, we will notify you and the Information Regulator (South Africa) as required by section 22 of POPIA. Report a suspected vulnerability or compromise to privacy@example.com.

• Account and profile information: for as long as your account is open, then removed or de-identified on closure.
• Incident reports, comments and corroborations: retained as part of the neighbourhood's community safety record and long-term statistics. On account closure your reports are de-identified rather than deleted, unless the law requires deletion.
• Photographs: retained with their report, and deleted when the report is deleted or when a moderator removes them.
• Join requests: retained while pending and for a reasonable period after a decision, as proof of the residency check.
• Consent and acceptance records: retained for as long as needed to show that we processed your information lawfully.
• Notifications and reminders: retained for a limited operational period.

Under POPIA you may:

• ask us to confirm whether we hold personal information about you, and request a copy of it;
• ask us to correct or delete information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, excessive, out of date, incomplete, misleading, or obtained unlawfully;
• object to processing based on legitimate interest, on reasonable grounds;
• withdraw a consent you gave, at any time;
• not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing — we do not make automated decisions about you;
• complain to the Information Regulator, and to seek civil relief in court.

To exercise a right, contact privacy@example.com. We may ask you to verify your identity, and we will respond within a reasonable time. Access requests may be made on Form 2 prescribed under POPIA, and a prescribed fee may apply to a copy of the information.

We use only the storage strictly necessary to keep you signed in and to remember your display preferences, such as the high-contrast setting. The statistics you see in the app are produced from incident reports inside the app itself. We do not run third-party advertising or cross-site tracking.

The app is intended for adults. We do not knowingly process the personal information of a child without the consent of a competent person. If you believe a child's information has been submitted, contact the Information Officer and we will investigate and remove it where required.

Raise a complaint with our Information Officer first. If you are not satisfied, you may complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) at complaints.IR@justice.gov.za or via https://inforegulator.org.za.

We will update this notice when our processing changes. The version number and effective date at the top of the page show the current version, and we will ask you to accept a materially updated version before you continue reporting. See also our Terms & Conditions.