Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal information PipoSpace holds, why, who it is shared with and what you can do about it. 1. Who is responsible PipoSpace is operated by ThundrCraft Technologies, 32 Harare Drive, Marlborough, Harare, Zimbabwe. The head of ThundrCraft Technologies is our Information Officer (data protection officer), reachable at [email protected]. How we govern the information we hold is set out in our Data Governance statement. We handle personal information under the Zimbabwe Cyber and Data Protection Act [Chapter 12:07], the South African Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA), and the data protection law of the other countries where members live. 2. What we hold - Account: your email address, a hash of your password (never the password itself), the public keys of your passkeys, and your sessions. - Profile: username, display name and, if you add them, bio, country, region, age band, language and how you present your identity. - What you create: stories, voice recordings and their transcripts, responses, discussions, journal entries (private to you), reactions, carried and saved stories, circles, space memberships, and who you listen to, block or mute. - Verification: the result of your live camera check from Microsoft Azure Face and its reference numbers. Azure Face carries out the liveness check; PipoSpace never receives or stores your images, face templates or identity documents. - Safety records: reports you make, reports about your content, moderation decisions and appeals. - Security records: one-way hashes of IP addresses and device descriptions (never the addresses themselves), used for rate limits, abuse prevention and the audit log. - Product events: which actions happen and on which item, never the text of stories or responses. - Notifications: your notification settings. Alerts in the current iOS and Android apps are shown on that phone while the app is open. We do not create a push token for advertising, and we do not track you across other companies' apps. If an older app version registered an Expo push token, signing out or turning notifications off removes it. - Legacy: your instructions for what happens to your stories after your death, stored encrypted. - Data requests: your requests to export or delete your information. 3. Why we use it - To run PipoSpace for you: your account, your stories, and the people and spaces you choose (our agreement with you). - To confirm that published stories come from verified humans (our agreement with you and your consent to the check). - To keep people safe: moderation, appeals, preventing abuse and responding to lawful requests (our legitimate interest in a safe community, and legal obligations). - To keep PipoSpace secure and working, and to understand which features are used, without reading story text (our legitimate interest). - To send the emails and notifications you ask for. Notifications never contain story or response text. We do not sell personal information and we do not build advertising profiles. 4. Sensitive information in stories Stories often reveal health, beliefs, relationships, sex life or experiences of crime. You decide what to share and how: publicly, under a pseudonym or anonymously, and to whom. We use that information only to show your story as you chose. Use outside PipoSpace needs your separate permission for each story, and every such permission is off until you turn it on. 5. Who we share it with Only the service providers we need, under contracts that limit them to working on our instructions: - Microsoft Azure Face, for the live camera check; - OpenAI, only when you use writing assistance or story import, and only the text you send to it; - hosting and network providers, including Netlify and Cloudflare, and the cloud providers that run our servers, database and file storage; - GoDaddy, which delivers our emails. We give information to authorities only when the law requires it, through a recorded legal process. 6. Information sent abroad Our servers and some providers are outside your country, mainly in the United States and the European Union. We send personal information abroad only to providers bound by protections at least as strong as the law requires. 7. How long we keep it We keep your information while your account is open. When you ask us to delete your account, we delete your voice recordings, imports, journal, reactions, saved stories, memberships, relationships, devices, notifications, passkeys and legacy instructions; we blank your stories, responses and discussions; and we anonymise your profile and account. We keep, for accountability, audit log entries (which hold reference numbers and hashes, not content), moderation records about your content, and the verification decision behind content you published. Deleted information can remain in encrypted backups for up to 35 days until they expire. We may hold a deletion while the law requires us to keep information, for example during an open lawful request, and we tell you if we do. 8. Your rights You can see and export your information (Me > Account > Export), correct your profile, change your privacy settings, withdraw any consent, object to how we use your information, and ask us to delete it. You can start a deletion from Me > Account, from pipospace.com/legal/account_deletion, or by emailing [email protected] from the address on the account. You may complain to a data protection authority: in Zimbabwe, the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ); in South Africa, the Information Regulator (inforegulator.org.za); or the authority where you live. 9. Security Passwords and tokens are stored only as hashes, connections are encrypted, legacy instructions are encrypted at rest, staff access is limited by role, and staff actions are recorded in an audit log that cannot be edited. 10. Adults only PipoSpace is for people aged 18 and over. If we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we close it and delete its information. 11. Cookies We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in and secure. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. 12. Changes When we change this policy, we publish a new dated version here and tell members in the app before a significant change takes effect.