Privacy notice

The full notice, drafted against the Nigeria Data Protection Act, is being prepared and is not published yet.

What is below is what the system actually does today. You can hold us to it.

What we hold

Your name and phone number, which are your account. An email address if you give one. The identity document you upload for verification. The properties you view, the viewings you book, and the payments you make through us.

Who can see your ID

A 4U officer reviewing your account, and nobody else. It is never shown to a landlord. It is stored in a bucket that is not publicly readable and can only be opened through a link that expires in fifteen minutes.

Every time somebody opens it, that is recorded — who, when, from where, and the reason they gave. The officer has to state a purpose before the system will produce the link.

How long we keep it

Each document is given a deletion date when it is uploaded, and a job deletes the file on that date. Identity documents used for verification are held for ninety days. Records tied to a payment or a tenancy are kept longer, because they are financial records.

When a document is deleted, the file is removed from storage and a note stays saying we held it and destroyed it on that date. That record is itself part of being accountable for it.

Your phone number

A tenant and a landlord do not get each other's numbers until a payment completes. Before that, 4U coordinates everything. This is deliberate and it protects both sides.

Cookies

Four exist to keep you signed in. Three hold your session — the token itself, the one that renews it, and when it expires. The fourth remembers a sign-up you have started but not finished, and lasts about ten minutes. No script on the page can read any of them, and none of them is optional: without them you cannot stay signed in.

We also use Google Analytics, and only if you say yes. It counts visits and tells us which homes people look at, which pages they leave from, and what we should fix. It sets its own cookie and the information goes to Google. We do not use it for advertising, we do not sell anything to anybody, and there is no advertising pixel on this site.

You are asked the first time you visit, before any of it is loaded. If you say no, nothing from Google is downloaded at all — not the script, not a request, nothing — and the site works exactly the same. Your answer is remembered for a year in a cookie of our own called 4u_analytics.

It never runs on your dashboard. Once you are signed in, the pages that show your tenancy, your payments and your documents carry no analytics whatever you answered. The same is true of 4U's own staff screens and the emergency services' portal.

Changed your mind?

The fonts are served from our own server rather than someone else's.

Where your data is

Your identity documents are held on 4U's own storage, not with a third party.

Signing in is handled by Firebase, a Google service, which means your phone number and email address are stored on Google infrastructure outside Nigeria. We use it because it is what makes a code sent to your phone trustworthy. Everything else — your tenancy, your payments, your documents — stays on our own systems.

What we never do

We do not sell your data. We do not send marketing you did not ask for. Some messages cannot be switched off — the code that signs you in, and the receipt for money you have paid — because a person is entitled to those regardless of a preference setting.