What we collect, and why

You have an account holding your name, your username, and optionally an email address and phone number. Every observation you submit records:

• Your exact position at the moment of capture, with its accuracy. This is the point of the app: it is what allows a price to be presented as collected at the market rather than guessed. It is compared against the market’s own location and the distance is stored.
• The photographs you take, along with a checksum of the image so the same photo cannot be submitted twice.
• The prices, quantities and quality readings you enter, the assignment they belong to, and the time.
• Your device identifier, the app version and your time zone, used to diagnose failed submissions.
• A record of each review decision on your work, kept permanently and never edited, so a dispute about whether something was approved can be settled.

Your name is never attached to a published price. Customers see the market, the commodity, the price and a confidence score. They do not see who collected it, and the published records deliberately carry no agent identity.

Your position is recorded only when you submit an observation or log a supervision visit. The app does not track you in the background and does not record where you are between submissions.

Your account holds the same details, plus the districts you are responsible for. Your decisions on other people’s work are recorded permanently: which observation, what you decided, when, and the reason you gave. Supervision visits you log record your position at the sub-county you visited.

District coordinators keep a register of local people who can confirm what a market was doing on a given day. If you are on it, we hold your name, optionally your phone number, your sub-county, and a record of each time a coordinator checked a price with you and whether you agreed.

Phone numbers in this register are never returned by any part of the application that lists informants. They exist so a coordinator can call you and nothing else. If you would rather not be on the register, tell the coordinator who added you, or write to us at the address below.

We hold your account and organisation details, your subscription and what you have looked at within the product. We do not sell customer data, and we do not share it with other customers.

• Sign-in sessions, with the browser or app you used and a one-way hash of your IP address. We store the hash rather than the address itself so a session can be recognised without keeping a log of where people are.
• The time you last signed in.
• An append-only audit trail of actions taken on observations, so the history of a price cannot be quietly rewritten.

We do not sell personal data and we do not use it for advertising. It reaches these services because the product cannot run without them:

• Cloudflare R2 stores the photographs agents take.
• DigitalOcean hosts the application and the database, in their managed infrastructure.
• Google, only if you choose to sign in with a Google account. We receive your name and email address from them; they do not receive your Vyakula data.

We disclose data to anyone else only where the law requires it, and we will tell you unless we are prohibited from doing so.

Market observations, the review decisions on them and the audit trail are kept indefinitely. They are the evidence behind published prices, and a price whose evidence has been deleted cannot honestly be described as verified.

Photographs are kept for as long as the observation they support. Sessions expire on their own. If your account is closed we keep the observations, because they are market records, but they carry no identity to a customer.

Under Uganda’s Data Protection and Privacy Act 2019 you may ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and object to how it is used. Write to privacy@vyakulaintelligence.com and we will respond within 30 days.

Some data cannot be deleted on request: an audit record of a verification decision exists precisely so that it cannot be removed by the person it describes. Where that applies we will say so and explain why.

Vyakula is a work tool for adults. We do not knowingly collect data about anyone under 18.

If we change what we collect we will change this page and update the date at the top. Material changes affecting field agents will also be shown in the app.

Vyakula Intelligence, Kampala, Uganda. privacy@vyakulaintelligence.com