Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal data GovStatz collects, why we collect it, who can see it, and what you can ask us to do about it. It applies to govstatz.com (and the govstatz.b-cdn.net address that serves the same app from our content delivery network) and the GovStatz mobile-style web app, and to any GovStatz account you already hold. GovStatz is a transparency platform: it publishes Nigerian governance data (lawmakers, budgets, projects, bills) and lets citizens discuss, report and verify that information.

We are the data controller. We do not sell personal data. GovStatz does sell its own advertising: labelled sponsored cards, a scrolling line and a sidebar slot, booked directly with us. A person reviews each one before it appears. Delivery is entirely first-party: we run no advertising network, and we load no third-party analytics service, ad tag, remote creative, tracking pixel or advertising script into the app. Every audience figure an advertiser is told comes from a measurement GovStatz makes itself, on the terms set out below. The switch for it is on this page, for readers with an account and without one.

Information you give us

• Account data: your email address and password (stored as a hash by our authentication provider), and your name if you choose to enter it at sign-up.
• Onboarding details: username, state, local government area (LGA) and, optionally, ward. These are required before the app opens.
• Profile fields you choose to fill: phone number, gender, age range, country, bio, headline, profession, affiliation, role, civic role, expertise tags, skills, education, cover photo and profile photo.
• Content you create: feed posts, comments, replies and upvotes; group-chat and direct messages; poll votes and the written argument you attach to a vote; town-hall RSVPs; job and marketplace enquiries you post; advertisement campaign details including advertiser name and email.
• Citizen reports ("I-Report"): a reporter name (required unless you are an verified official account), an optional email, the state, LGA and free-text location, the GPS coordinates your browser sends if you allow location access, the photo or video you attach, any public official you tag, and any source link you paste.
• Public-official verification: full legal name, office title, chamber, assembly, official email, phone number, a headshot, biography and social handles, plus your National Identification Number (NIN). NIN is government-issued identifying data; we ask for it only to confirm that a person claiming a public office is who they say they are, and it is visible to you and to GovStatz administrators only.
• Subscription enquiries: if you buy a paid plan, our payment provider (Paystack) receives your email address with the order. We do not see or store your card number, PIN or CVV.

Information collected automatically

• Reading records: the page you were on, the site that sent you here, your browser and operating system, the device type, screen and viewport size, the browser language, the time zone your device clock is set to, a random identifier for the tab you are reading in, and roughly how long that page stayed open. These are written for every reader, signed in or not. A platform that can only see its own members cannot tell a page nobody opens from a page people read and leave.
• How a reading record identifies you: it does not. The row holds no name and no email. A signed-in reader is stored as a keyed hash of their account address; a reader with no account is stored as a hash of an id their own browser invented and keeps in localStorage. Both hashes are computed inside the database with a secret that is not in the app, not in the network request, and not readable through the API. Nobody who reads the analytics table, GovStatz staff included, can turn a stored page view back into you. No browser fingerprint is assembled: there is no canvas probe, no font list, no combined signal. The counts we publish are therefore browsers, not people: clear your storage, use a private window or switch device and GovStatz sees a new browser.
• Where a reading record puts you: in a country. The time zone is the whole location signal, and GovStatz maps it to the country that zone is named after. A browser set to Africa/Lagos is counted in Nigeria. It is never a city, never a street, never a coordinate, and it is not taken from your IP address. Nigeria has one time zone, so no reader is ever resolved below "Nigeria"; a device whose clock was set elsewhere by its manufacturer is counted there. Where a zone belongs to more than one country, or to a territory whose status is disputed, GovStatz records only its continent, because the alternative is this platform choosing a side. We do not ask your browser for location permission and no reading record can be made to depend on you granting it.
• The one place the two halves are joined: when a browser that was reading without an account later signs up, that browser records which account it became, and the pair is stored as a hash and a user id in a table no visitor-facing read reaches. That link is what lets us state, as one number, how many browsers read GovStatz and then registered. It answers no other question and is read back only as an aggregate.
• Browser storage: a small set of GovStatz keys in localStorage and sessionStorage. They hold your theme, which notifications and post impressions you have already seen, which posts you upvoted, your civic-challenge progress, a sync log, the flag recording that you accepted these terms, the reading id described above, and the switch that turns the reading records off. These are storage records, not cookies, and they are not shared with third parties.
• Your IP address is not stored by GovStatz. The analytics writer discards the address before a row exists, so no reading record can be looked up by it. An address may still appear in the raw web-server or CDN logs kept by our infrastructure providers, which is standard for operating any website.

Information from other sources

If you sign in with Google or GitHub, that provider shares your name, email address, profile picture and provider identifier with us. We use them to create or recognise your GovStatz account and nothing else. Governance statistics we publish come from public sources such as the National Assembly, the Office of the Auditor-General, the Debt Management Office and the National Bureau of Statistics; those records concern public officials acting in public office, not private individuals.

• To run your account and show you the site you asked for.
• To attribute the content you publish, so readers know who is speaking and can hold public officials to account.
• To verify elected and appointed officials and give their accounts a verification mark.
• To route citizen reports to the responsible office and to publish approved reports on the relevant lawmaker or project page.
• To measure feature usage and fix faults, using the usage records described above.
• To keep the platform safe: detect impersonation, spam, fabricated reports and abuse, and to log administrator actions on member data.
• To bill for and deliver paid features, and to answer support requests.

Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2025 (NDPA) and the Nigeria Data Protection Commission's (NDPC) General Implementation Guide, we rely on: your consent (given when you accepted these terms and when you submitted sensitive data such as NIN or GPS location); the performance of our agreement with you; our legitimate interest in operating and securing a transparency platform; and the substantial public interest in journalism, freedom of information and accountability for public office. Where your content concerns other people, a lawmaker's voting record for example, we process it as public-interest information about a person acting in a public capacity.

• Members of the public: the pages you publish once they are approved for public display, including citizen reports with the reporter name you supplied, and any profile you deliberately set to be public. Media files you upload are served from a public content-delivery bucket, so anyone with the link can view them. Treat anything sensitive as shareable.
• Signed-in GovStatz members: the member directory and profile pages. Every authenticated member can read the profile record of other members, which currently includes the profile fields you have filled, your username, state and LGA. Do not put data in your profile that you would not show a colleague.
• The other participants in a conversation: the recipients of a direct message, and members of a group chat, who can read that group’s messages.
• GovStatz administrators: our small staff team can read member profiles, messages, reports, verification submissions (including NIN) and usage records to moderate, verify and operate the service. That access is limited to administrator accounts and is itself governed by these terms.
• Our service providers, listed in section 6.

We keep your data for as long as your account is open and, after that, only as long as we need it for a legitimate purpose such as a legal obligation, an unresolved abuse investigation, or the integrity of published public-interest records. Reading records are the exception: a scheduled pass deletes every page view, signed in or not, 90 days after it was written, and the deletion is not stopped by an account staying open. Deleting your profile in the app removes your profile record immediately; posts, messages, votes, reports and usage records tied to your email are then removed on request under section 7.

• Supabase is our database, authentication and file-storage provider. Data is held in their AWS eu-west-1 (Ireland) region. This means member data is processed outside Nigeria, in a jurisdiction with a data-protection framework; the NDPA permits transfers where the destination ensures an adequate level of protection, and we use a mainstream provider for that reason.
• Bunny CDN distributes the app's static files and published media from data-centres around the world, including in Africa and Europe.
• Paystack processes subscription payments and receives your email address for the transaction.
• Zoho Mail hosts the mail for this domain (mx.zoho.com; United States data centre). The addresses published across this platform are real mailboxes there, and mail you send us and our replies are stored in that service, not in the GovStatz database. Every desk address delivers to one mailbox; there is no automatic reply, no guaranteed reading time, and no promise that any particular message has been seen. One enquiry form feeds that mailbox from this side: what you send through /contact is stored as a row in the GovStatz database and is also placed as a message in the mailbox of the desk your category routes to, so the same text and your address are held in both places. Nothing is sent to you automatically from either. Because that provider is outside Nigeria, correspondence sent to a desk is processed in a jurisdiction with a data-protection framework, on the same basis as the section above.
• Google and GitHub act as sign-in providers if you choose them, and receive the standard OAuth request from your browser.
• No data broker, ad network, marketing platform or third-party analytics service is given access to your personal data.

Subject to the exceptions in the NDPA, you can ask us to:

• Confirm what we hold about you and give you a copy in a usable, machine-readable format.
• Correct anything inaccurate. Most profile data you can edit yourself from your profile page.
• Delete your personal data, or delete it where our processing has no lawful basis left.
• Object to processing, restrict it, or withdraw a consent you gave (for example by refusing location access when filing a report).
• Lodge a complaint with us first, and then with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (contactable through ndpc.gov.ng) if you are not satisfied.

Send any of these requests to privacy@govstatz.com from the email address on your account. We acknowledge requests within 72 hours and normally complete them within 30 days; we may need to confirm your identity, and we cannot erase records we are required to keep or information about public officials held in the public interest. The request buttons in our Security Centre open a ticket with our administrators; a request you send by email is always acted on.

Choices available in the app

From time to time GovStatz writes to the email address on your account to tell members what has changed on the platform. These are letters from GovStatz, not a third party's advertising, and every one of them names the address it was sent to and carries an unsubscribe link. Using it removes that address from the list at/unsubscribe It does not close your account, and it does not stop a desk answering a message you sent us.

• Turn on two-factor authentication (an authenticator app) or a passkey from your profile.
• Decline the location prompt in your browser when filing a citizen report. The report can still be filed with a typed location.
• Leave a group chat, or delete your profile.
• Unsubscribe from member letters with the one-click link in any of them.
• Switch off the reading records for this browser, from the control below and without signing in.
• Control the sponsored cards from Settings → Sponsored content: turn them off altogether, show fewer, pause them for an hour, a day or a week, exclude a kind of service, take out a place, or hide one named sponsor and show it again whenever you choose. Every one of those choices is stored against your account and honoured in the browser before a card is ever drawn. A reader with no account can hide a card from the card itself, and that choice is kept in this browser only.
• Nothing on this list is a condition of reading GovStatz. A reader who switches sponsored content off still reads every record. These choices are stored to be honoured, not to be reported: no advertiser-facing figure on this platform counts them, and none names a reader who made one.

The reading switch

You do not need an account to refuse being counted, so the switch is on this page and not only inside Settings. It is kept in this browser and nowhere else: signing in on another device does not carry it, and clearing site storage starts a new reading id. So every audience figure GovStatz reports counts browsers, not people.

This page carries the switch when you read it inside the app at govstatz.com/privacy; in the app it is also at Settings → Reading analytics. Turning it off stops the next page view from this browser being written, and takes effect immediately, without an account or a sign-in.

Traffic between your browser and GovStatz uses HTTPS. Data is stored in a PostgreSQL database with row-level security policies on every table, so a signed-in member can only read the records the policy allows. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and never stored in plain text by GovStatz. You can add a second factor. Administrator access to member data is limited to accounts we control.

To be clear about the limits: GovStatz protects your data with the usual engineering controls, but it is not end-to-end encrypted. A direct message is encrypted in transit and at rest, and our administrators can read it if they must investigate abuse or a legal complaint. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure; if you need confidentiality from us as well, do not send GovStatz that information. We will notify you and the NDPC of a breach affecting your personal data as the NDPA requires.

GovStatz is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their data. Civic participation by students aged 13 to 17 should happen with a parent's or school's consent; under-13 accounts are removed when we find them.

If we make a material change we will tell you in the app and by email before it takes effect, and the "Last updated" date at the top will change. Continuing to use GovStatz after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Personal data is answered by one desk: privacy@govstatz.com. Everything else is on the contact page: an account problem, a correction or a press query. Phone: +234 812 900 5839. Written requests reach the team that operates GovStatz at TMac Digital in Abuja, Nigeria, and that team reads the desk inside GovStatz rather than a separate mail client, so a request is not lost between two systems.