Privacy Policy

Last Updated: March 2024

1. Introduction

Welcome to WatchWay Nigeria ("WatchWay", "we", "our", "us"). We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy policy will inform you as to how we look after your personal data when you visit our website (regardless of where you visit it from) and tell you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

2. The Data We Collect

We may collect, use, store, and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:

  • Identity Data includes your email address (via Google Single Sign-On). We never collect or store your password if you log in through Google.
  • Location Data includes exact GPS coordinates (Latitude and Longitude) collected only when you explicitly submit or verify a hazard report. We do not track your location continuously in the background.
  • Media Data includes live photographs of hazards taken via your device camera. Metadata linked to these images may be processed to verify the authenticity of the report.
  • Device Data includes anonymized device identifiers used strictly as an anti-fraud mechanism to prevent single users from verifying their own hazard reports.

3. How We Use Your Data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

  • To crowdsource and verify public infrastructure decay across Nigeria.
  • To assign "Civic Points" to your account based on your verified contributions to the platform.
  • To broadcast verified hazards to public social media accounts (e.g., our automated X/Twitter bot) in order to alert relevant government agencies and the general public. Note: Public social media broadcasts only include the hazard location, type, and severity. Your personal account identity is never broadcast.
  • To secure the platform against sybil attacks (e.g., using device IDs to prevent a user from voting multiple times).

4. Data Sharing and Third Parties

Because WatchWay is an open data civic platform, hazard reports (including the image of the hazard and its coordinates) are publicly visible. However, your account details (email and personal identity) are strictly restricted and never sold to advertisers.

We use the following third-party infrastructure:

  • Google Cloud Storage to securely store photographic evidence.
  • Supabase to host our underlying PostgreSQL records securely.
  • X (Twitter) API strictly as a one-way notification broadcast when 3 independent citizens scientifically verify a hazard. We do not read or process your personal social media feeds.

5. Data Retention

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. Public hazard photos and geospatial data may be retained indefinitely to build a historical record of infrastructure decay and repair times.

6. Your Legal Rights

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. This includes the right to request access, correction, erasure, restriction, transfer, or to object to processing.

7. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact us at info@stabilty.com.