Privacy policy

The short version. We collect what you type into Huddle and what you need in order to have an account, and not much else. We do not sell it, we run no advertising, and there is no tracker in the app. Anonymous posts are anonymous to other students, not to us. You can delete any of it, or all of it, yourself. Everything below is the long version, and the long version is the one that counts.

1. Who we are

Huddle is a social network for students at Nigerian universities. It is built and run by Voyager Technologies, in Lagos and Ilorin, and Voyager Technologies is the data controller for everything described on this page. That means we are the ones who decided what gets collected and why, and we are the ones you hold responsible for it.

Write to support@huddle.ng about anything here. A person reads that mailbox. Put "Privacy" in the subject line if you want it routed faster.

We have a data protection officer, as the Data Protection Act 2023 requires. You reach them at the same address with "Data protection" in the subject, and they answer for everything on this page.

2. What this policy covers

The Huddle apps for iOS and Android, the website at huddle.ng, and the emails we send you. It applies whether you have an account, are sitting on the waitlist, or have only ever read this page.

It stops at our edge. If you tap a link someone posted, message a seller on WhatsApp, or sign in with Google, you are dealing with that company under their terms, and we have no visibility into what happens next.

3. What we collect

To make you an account

• Your email address. It is your sign-in and where account emails go.
• Your name and username. Your display name is what other students see. Your username is what they type to find you.
• A password, if you sign up with one. We never see it. It goes to our authentication provider, which stores a one-way hash, and there is no way for us to read it back. That is also why we cannot tell you what it was when you forget.
• Your Google or Apple account, if you use those buttons instead. They send us an email address and a name, nothing more. Apple lets you hide the address behind a relay and we accept that.
• Your university, which decides which campus you land in.
• Whether you are 18 or older, or 16 or 17 with a parent or guardian's agreement. You tell us which when you sign up, and we keep that answer and the date. We do not ask for your date of birth.

Because Huddle is a university network

• Your matric number, or for staff, a staff ID. We ask at sign-up and check that what you type matches your university's format. You can leave it for later, and verification is how it gets confirmed. It is how we tell students from everyone else, which is the entire premise of the place.
• Your faculty, department, course of study and level.
• Your gender, if you fill it in. You do not have to, and nothing in the app depends on it.
• Verification documents, if you ask to be verified: a photo of your ID card, a course form, a fee receipt or a JAMB result. Someone on our team checks that the name on it matches the name on your profile and marks the verification approved or rejected. The file is kept in private storage that only reviewers can open, through links that expire within minutes, and it is deleted as soon as it has been reviewed. What we keep is the result: approved or rejected, the kind of document, and the date.

What you make on Huddle

• Posts, comments, polls, poll votes and pulses.
• Direct messages, voice notes included. They are private between the people in the conversation and nobody here reads them in the ordinary course of running Huddle. They are stored on our database rather than end-to-end encrypted, which means a lawful order or a serious safety investigation could reach them. We would rather say that than let you assume otherwise.
• Photos, videos and files attached to any of the above, or uploaded as a resource.
• Marketplace listings, and the contact route you choose for them. Pick phone or WhatsApp and the number you type is shown to anyone who opens the listing. That is what it is for, so choose deliberately.
• Events you create, and your RSVPs.
• Your profile photo and bio.
• Reports you send us about someone else, and whatever you wrote in them.

What comes from using the app

• What you have done here: spaces you joined, posts you boosted or dropped, things you saved, pulses you watched, your streak, your reputation score.
• A push notification token, one for each device, once you allow notifications. It identifies the installation rather than you, and it is the only device identifier we hold.
• Crash reports. When the app falls over we get the error, the screen it happened on, the app version and the kind of device. The settings that would attach your IP address, your cookies or the body of the request are all turned off, and your account appears as an opaque ID and nothing else.
• Ordinary server records. Our hosting and database providers log requests so the service can be run and abuse can be stopped. Those logs contain IP addresses and are kept on the providers' own schedules.
• Waitlist entries, if you signed up before your campus opened: name, email, matric or staff ID, and which university.

4. What we do not collect

Worth stating plainly, because apps in this category usually do collect most of it.

• Your location. Not fine, not coarse, not in the background. There is no location code in the app at all, and all three Android location permissions are explicitly blocked in the build, so it could not ask even if some future dependency tried. If the campus map ever ships that changes, and this page changes before the feature does.
• Your contacts, your calendar, or your photo library. The picker hands us the one photo you chose and nothing around it.
• Your searches. Recent searches sit on your phone and are never sent to us. Clearing them in the app is the end of them.
• What you do outside Huddle. No advertising SDK, no pixel, no attribution kit, no cross-app tracker.
• Payment or card details. Nothing is paid for inside Huddle. A marketplace listing carries a price, but the money changes hands between the two of you, somewhere else.
• Performance traces. Crash reporting in the app is set to crashes only, with performance sampling at zero.

We do not sell personal data and we do not hand it to anyone for advertising. There is no version of Huddle where that changes without you being told first and asked.

5. Why we use it, and on what basis

Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023 requires a lawful basis for every use and expects us to tell you which one applies. These are ours.

• To give you what you signed up for (performance of a contract). Making your account, showing you your campus, delivering your messages, running the marketplace, holding your files.
• To keep the place safe and honest (our legitimate interest, and yours). Verifying students, reviewing reports, acting on abuse, stopping spam and account takeovers, keeping the service standing.
• Because you asked us to (consent). Push notifications, the camera and microphone, student verification, and anything optional you chose to fill in. Withdraw any of it without losing your account.
• Because the law requires it (legal obligation). Answering a valid order from a court or a regulator, and reporting child sexual abuse material, which we do whether or not anyone asks.
• To protect someone (vital interests). When we have reason to believe a person is in immediate danger.

We also look at aggregate counts, such as how many people joined a campus this week, to decide where to launch next. Those numbers are not about any one person and cannot be turned back into one.

6. Anonymous posts

Verified students can post anonymously in some places. Anonymous there means other students cannot see who wrote it. Your name and photo are not attached and there is nothing in the app that would let them work it out.

It does not mean the post has no author. Your account ID sits on the row like it does on any other post. We can see it, a moderator handling a report can see it, and a lawful order can reach it. This is how anonymity stops being a free pass for harassment, and it is also why an anonymous post is deleted along with your account.

If you need to say something nobody can ever trace, Huddle is the wrong place to say it. That is an honest limit rather than a gap we intend to close.

7. Who can see what

• Your campus. Posts, comments, pulses, listings, resources and events are visible to signed-in students at your university. Huddle is not a public website and none of it is indexed by search engines, but a campus is thousands of people. Treat a post as public to your university, because it is.
• Your profile. Display name, username, photo, bio, title, faculty, department, level and reputation are visible to other students. Your email address and your matric number are not.
• Direct messages. Only the people in the conversation.
• Marketplace contact details. Whatever you put in a listing is visible to anyone who opens it.
• Pulse views. Post a pulse and you can see who watched it. Watch one and the person who posted it can see you did.
• Our team. A small number of people at Voyager Technologies can reach account and content data when they are dealing with a report, a verification, a bug or a legal request. Nobody browses it out of interest.

What other students do with what you post is beyond our reach. Anything on a screen can be screenshotted. Deleting a post takes it off Huddle; it cannot take it off somebody's camera roll.

8. Companies that process data for us

Huddle runs on other people's infrastructure. Each company below handles data on our instructions under a contract, and none of them may use it for their own purposes.

• Supabase. The database and the authentication system. Your account, your content, your messages and every relationship between them live here.
• Cloudflare R2. Every file you upload: photos, video, voice notes, documents and profile pictures. Verification documents sit in a separate private store that is never served publicly.
• Vercel. Hosts huddle.ng and the handful of server routes behind it, in its London region. Its Web Analytics counts page views on the website without cookies and without an identifier that follows you between sites.
• Sentry. Crash reports, on its European servers.
• Resend. Sends the email: confirm your address, reset your password, the occasional service notice.
• Apple and Google. Deliver push notifications to your device through APNs and Firebase Cloud Messaging, which means the text of a notification passes through them. Separately, if you use the Sign in with Apple or Google buttons, those companies tell us who you are at sign-in.
• KLIPY. The GIF picker. Open it and type, and the search term goes to KLIPY so it can send GIFs back. Your account is not attached to that request, and nothing goes to them unless you open the picker.

We will also hand data over when a court, the police or a regulator compels it through proper legal process, and when we need advice from our lawyers, accountants or insurers. If Voyager Technologies is ever bought or merged, your data moves with the service, and you will be told before it does.

9. Where your data is held

Not in Nigeria. The providers in section 8 run in Europe and the United States, so using Huddle means your data leaves the country and is processed there. The Data Protection Act 2023 permits this where the receiving country offers adequate protection or the contract supplies it, and our agreements with these providers carry the standard clauses that do.

It is also the practical position for any Nigerian app of this size. Pretending otherwise would be the only dishonest thing available to say about it.

10. How long we keep it

• Your account and everything on it: until you delete it. There is no dormancy sweep and we do not close accounts for being quiet.
• Pulses: hidden after 24 hours and deleted from the database within the hour after that, file included.
• Posts, messages, listings and files you delete: gone from the live database as you delete them, with the attached files removed from storage in the same request. No recycle bin, no grace period, nothing to restore.
• Verification documents: deleted once they have been reviewed. The result of the review stays on your account while you have one.
• Push tokens: until you sign out, uninstall, turn notifications off, or ask us to clear them.
• Reports and moderation records: kept after a case closes, because they exist for the person who was reported about as much as for us. A report that points only at a deleted account goes with that account.
• Waitlist entries: until your campus opens and you have joined, or until you ask to come off.
• Crash reports and server logs: on our providers' schedules, measured in weeks and months rather than years.
• Backups: encrypted, and they exist so the service can be brought back from a failure. They are overwritten on a rolling basis and deleted data ages out with the backup it was in. Nobody reads them in the ordinary course of running Huddle.

11. How we protect it

• Everything moves over TLS. There is no unencrypted path into Huddle.
• Data at rest is encrypted by our database and storage providers.
• Whether you can read a given row is decided by row-level security rules in the database, tied to your account, rather than by the app remembering to check.
• Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider. We never hold the plain text.
• Your session token lives in the operating system's secure store on the phone, not in ordinary app storage.
• Uploads go straight to storage through short-lived signed URLs. The keys that could reach the whole bucket never leave the server.
• Administrative access is limited to the people who need it and taken away when they stop needing it.

No system is perfectly secure, and anyone who tells you theirs is has stopped thinking about it. If you find a hole in ours, write to support@huddle.ng with "Security" in the subject. We will not come after you for looking, as long as you do not go rummaging through other people's accounts while you are in there.

12. Your rights

The Data Protection Act 2023 gives you all of the following, and we apply them to everyone regardless of where they are.

• See what we hold. In the app under Settings, or in settings on the website, choose Download your data and you get a copy straight away. If you want something that file does not cover, email us and we will send it within 30 days, usually much sooner.
• Correct it. Profile, then Edit profile. Anything you cannot reach yourself, we will fix on request.
• Delete part of it. Posts, messages, listings, resources and files, in the app, immediately. The data deletion page lists what you can do yourself and what to ask us for.
• Delete all of it. In the app under Settings, Delete Account, or on the account deletion page with nothing installed. It happens at once and cannot be undone.
• Take it with you. The same download is a machine-readable JSON file you can take anywhere.
• Object, or ask us to pause. If you think a particular use is not justified, say so. We stop unless we have a reason we can put in writing.
• Withdraw consent. Turn off notifications, camera or microphone in your device settings, or switch off notification types in the app. Withdrawing does not undo what was done while the consent stood.
• Complain. To us, and to the regulator if we do not put it right. Section 18.

None of this costs anything and we will not make you jump through hoops for it. We do have to be sure a request is really yours, which is why we ask you to write from the address on the account. Where we cannot establish that, we say no rather than hand your data to somebody claiming to be you.

13. Under-16s, and 16 and 17 year olds

Huddle is for people aged 16 and over, and the terms make that a condition of holding an account. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone younger, and if we find out an account belongs to someone under 16 we delete it and everything on it.

Some students here are 16 or 17, which is to say they are children in law, and the Act asks for a parent or guardian's consent before we process a child's data. So when you sign up we ask whether you are 18 or older, or 16 or 17 with your parent or guardian's agreement, and we record the answer. It also shapes how the place is run. Our child safety standards set out what is not allowed, how to report it and what we do when it is reported. If you are a parent or guardian and you believe your child has an account, write to support@huddle.ng and we will deal with it.

14. Cookies and on-device storage

The website uses cookies for signing in and staying signed in, and for nothing else. No advertising cookies, no third-party trackers. Web Analytics counts page views without a cookie and without an identifier that follows you anywhere.

The app uses no cookies at all. It keeps your session in the operating system's secure store and caches content you have already loaded so it opens with something on the screen instead of a spinner. Signing out clears both.

15. Ranking and automated decisions

Your feed is ordered by software: how recent a post is, how much activity it has, which spaces you are in and which you have muted. It is a sorting rule and it is the same rule for everybody. It builds no profile of you and there is no advertising hanging off it.

Nothing that matters is decided automatically. Verifications, reports, suspensions and removals are decided by a person, and a person is who you appeal to.

16. If something goes wrong

If there is a breach that puts your data at risk, we notify the Nigeria Data Protection Commission within 72 hours of finding out, as the Act requires, and we tell the people affected directly where the risk to them is significant. You will get what happened, what was exposed and what to do about it, in plain words, without waiting for us to have a comfortable version of the story.

17. Changes to this policy

We update this page as Huddle changes, and the date at the top always says when. Anything that materially changes what we collect or what we do with it gets announced in the app or by email before it starts, not after. Corrections and clarifications go in quietly with a new date.

Carrying on using Huddle after a change means you accept the updated policy. If you would rather not, the account deletion page is one tap from here.

18. Complaints and contact

Email support@huddle.ng. Tell us what you want and we answer within 30 days, which is the legal limit rather than our intention.

If we get it wrong, complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission at ndpc.gov.ng. If you are in the UK or the European Union, go to your own supervisory authority instead. You need no permission from us to do either, and you do not have to come to us first, though we would rather you did.