Privacy policy

Cirqon Africa Limited, Nairobi, Kenya, is the data controller for the information described here. You can reach us at support@cirqonafrika.co.ke.

Your waste collector is a separate company that uses Cirqon to run its business. For the information they hold about you as their customer, they are the controller and we process it on their behalf. If you want your details corrected or removed, telling either of us is enough — we will pass it on.

If you are a household or business receiving collections:

• Your name, phone number, and optionally your WhatsApp number and email address
• Your household or premises size, where you tell us
• Your address: the county, sub-county and ward, an address or landmark you type, and — if you allow it — the precise position of your premises from your device's GPS
• A profile photograph, if you choose to add one
• Your collection history, invoices, payments recorded against you, and any complaints or feedback you send

If you work for a collector or a recovery facility: your name, phone number, email, job title, branch, and a record of the actions you take in the system — which collections you completed, what you weighed in, what you changed.

If you report an environmental issue: what you describe, the precise location, a photograph if you attach one, and your name and phone number. You can report without an account, but a phone number is required so the report can be tracked and so the responsible authority can follow up.

We store coordinates precisely — to roughly a metre. That is deliberate: a collection vehicle has to find your gate, and an illegal dumping report is useless to a county officer if it only says “somewhere in this ward”.

The apps ask for location permission and you can refuse. If you do, you can still use Cirqon: you type your ward and address instead, and everything works except automatic matching to the nearest collector.

To provide the service you asked for — arranging collections, telling you when a crew is coming, and producing invoices and receipts. This is the performance of a contract with you or with your collector.

To meet legal obligations — waste handling is a regulated activity, and records of what was collected, weighed and recovered may have to be produced to a regulator.

To route environmental reports to the authority responsible for the location, which is the entire purpose of making a report.

Your assigned collector sees your name, phone number, address, collection history and what you owe. They need it to serve you, and it is the same information they would hold on paper.

Other collectors cannot see you. A collector can only read records belonging to their own organisation. If you switch collector, your new one sees your record from that point; your old one keeps the history of the service they provided.

Cirqon staff can see records across the platform in order to support it, investigate complaints and meet regulatory duties. Those actions are logged.

For environmental reports: Cirqon and the public body responsible for the location — a county government or environmental authority — receive the report so it can be acted on.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising.

• Hosting. Our servers are operated by a commercial hosting provider.
• App notifications. Push messages to your phone are delivered through Expo's notification service.
• SMS, WhatsApp and email. Where your collector has connected their own messaging account, your phone number or email address and the message are passed to that provider so it can be delivered. The collector chooses the provider and pays for it.

Traffic between your browser or app and Cirqon is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes and cannot be read back, including by us. Messaging credentials that collectors supply are encrypted before storage.

Access is restricted by role: staff at a collector or recovery facility see only the sections their organisation has granted them, and only records belonging to that organisation.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach occurs that is likely to cause you harm, we will notify you and the Data Commissioner as the law requires.

While you are a customer, and afterwards for as long as we are required to keep the record — collection, weighing and recovery records may be subject to regulatory retention periods, and financial records to tax ones.

When you ask us to delete your account we remove your personal details, but a collection that happened and an invoice that was issued remain as business records. We keep those without your contact details attached where we can.

Under the Data Protection Act, 2019 you have the right to be told what we hold about you, to get a copy of it, to have it corrected if it is wrong, to have it deleted where we have no lasting reason to keep it, to object to how we use it, and to have it transferred elsewhere.

Ask us at support@cirqonafrika.co.ke. We will respond within the period the Act allows and we will not charge you for a first request.

If you are not satisfied with our answer you can complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, which regulates this in Kenya.

Cirqon is for adults arranging a service for a household or business. We do not knowingly create accounts for anyone under 18. If you believe a child's information is on the platform, tell us and we will remove it.

If we change how we use your information we will update this page and change the date at the top. Where a change materially affects you, we will tell you in the app rather than rely on you noticing.