Legal

Privacy policy

How Kivoo collects, uses, shares and protects creators’, buyers’ and visitors’ data, and how to exercise your rights.

Draft, under review
This text is a first version written by the Kivoo team. It will be reviewed and may change before it becomes final. For any question, write to support@kivoo.africa.

1. Who is responsible for your data

Grimm Technologies SARL, the publisher of Kivoo (registered office: 770 Street 4.258, Yaoundé IV, Cameroon; registration number CM-NSI-02-2025-B13-00328; NIU M042517720179S), is the controller of the personal data collected on kivoo.africa, blog.kivoo.africa, developer.kivoo.africa, dashboard.kivoo.africa and kivoo.co. You can reach us at support@kivoo.africa.

Creators who receive their buyers’ contact details become responsible in turn for how they use them; the Terms of use limit that use to fulfilling the sale and answering buyers.

2. The data we collect

Kivoo only collects the data needed to run the service. There are no passwords: we store none.

  • Creators: email address, name and profile picture when they come from a Google, Facebook or X account, identifier of the sign-in method used, preferred language, store information (name, country, currency, description, logo and banners, public contact email, public WhatsApp number, social media links), mobile number for sale alerts by SMS, products and files offered for sale, sales and balance history, payout details (Mobile Money number or bank details), exchanges with support.
  • Buyers: email address (required for delivery), name, optional phone number given so the creator can reach you, Mobile Money number used to pay, order contents (products, amounts, dates), downloads and payment status. A purchase creates or attaches a Kivoo account to the email address used.
  • Visitors: technical data needed for security and operation (IP address, browser and operating system, pages visited, timestamps, request identifier), contents of messages sent from a store’s contact form or from the Contact page on kivoo.africa (name, email, message). When you visit a Kivoo store, we measure your visit: country determined from your IP address by our provider IPinfo, or failing that estimated from the time zone and language of your device, site or link you came from, device type and operating system, pages viewed and duration. The recorded visit contains neither your IP address nor any identifier that would follow you from one visit to the next. So as not to ask for your country on every page, we keep it for one day at most, under a fingerprint of your address: this fingerprint technically allows the address to be recovered, which is why it is deleted along with the country at the end of that day. If the visit leads to an order, it is linked to that order, to measure what each source sells, and deleted like the others after twelve months. On kivoo.africa, blog.kivoo.africa, developer.kivoo.africa and dashboard.kivoo.africa, we also measure the audience with Umami, a tool we host ourselves in the European Union and which sets no cookie: pages viewed (on the dashboard, without their parameters or any store, product or account identifier), the site you came from, country, region and city estimated from your IP address, browser, operating system, device type, language and screen size, page loading speed, and four steps: a click towards sign-up, the creation of an account (with the sign-in method used), the creation of a store and the publication of a product (with its type). Your IP address is used for this calculation and is not recorded; the identifier that groups your pages changes every day, so two days of visits are never linked.
  • Creators who use “Improve with AI”: the instructions they write to guide the drafting, the proposed product page, the date, the product concerned, the team member who asked for it and the AI credits spent.

3. Why we use it

This data is used only for the purposes below, based on the performance of our contract with you, on our legal obligations, on our legitimate interest in securing the service or, where the law requires it, on your consent.

  • Create and manage accounts, sign users in with an email code or a third-party account, keep their session alive.
  • Run the stores: host products and files, display public pages, process orders and deliver digital products.
  • Collect payments and send payouts, keep each store’s balance, prevent fraud and handle complaints.
  • Send the messages the service needs: sign-in code, order confirmation and download links, sale alert to the creator by email or SMS, payout updates, support replies. Kivoo does not send marketing messages without your agreement.
  • Keep the platform secure: request rate limiting, abuse detection, technical logs.
  • Meet our legal obligations, in particular accounting ones, and answer requests from competent authorities.
  • Produce aggregated usage statistics, including the audience measurement of our sites, to improve the service, without individual profiling.
  • Draft, at a creator’s request, a proposed product page with artificial intelligence (“Improve with AI”), which the creator reviews and applies or not, and count the AI credits spent.

4. Who we share it with

Kivoo never sells your data. It is shared only with the people and providers below, limited to what each of them needs to know.

The creator of a store has access to the email address, name, phone number and orders of the buyers of their store. They do not have access to the Mobile Money number used to pay. A store’s public information (name, description, logo, contact email, WhatsApp number, social links, products) is visible to everyone.

Our technical providers (processors) process data on our behalf, under our instructions and with confidentiality commitments:

  • Mobile Money payment provider (Ejara, for MTN Mobile Money and Orange Money in Cameroon, Airtel Money and Moov Money in Gabon, Orange Money in the Central African Republic): payer’s phone number, name, email address, amount and currency, order reference.
  • Email delivery service (SMTP): recipient’s email address and message content (sign-in code, order confirmation, download links, sale alerts, payout updates).
  • SMS delivery service (Nexah, in Cameroon): mobile number of creators who enabled sale alerts.
  • S3-compatible object storage: product files, logos, banners and previews, stored privately and served through signed, time-limited links.
  • Hosting provider for our servers and database: all of the service’s data.
  • Sign-in providers (Google, Facebook, X) when you choose to sign in with one of them: they send us your email address, name and profile picture, and know that you use Kivoo.
  • Artificial intelligence provider (Anthropic, in the United States), when a creator uses “Improve with AI”: the product draft written by the creator (type, title, tagline, description, price, frequently asked questions, date and venue of an event) and any instructions they add, to draft a proposed product page. No buyer or visitor data is sent to it.
  • IP address geolocation service (IPinfo, in the United States), when you open a store: your IP address, to find out your country and offer you the payment methods and currency that match it. Kivoo keeps the country obtained for one day at most, under a fingerprint of the address from which it can be recovered, then deletes both.

Kivoo may also disclose data to authorities when the law requires it, or to establish, exercise or defend its rights.

5. Where your data is hosted

Data is hosted by our hosting provider Hetzner Online, in Finland (European Union), and may be processed by our providers in countries other than yours. When that is the case, Kivoo makes sure those providers offer appropriate data-protection safeguards, in particular through contractual commitments.

This is the case of Anthropic, in the United States, which receives the product drafts sent by “Improve with AI”, and of IPinfo, in the United States, which receives the IP address of store visitors.

6. How long we keep it

We keep data for as long as needed for the purposes described above, then delete or anonymise it.

  • Account, stores and products: for the life of the account, then deleted or anonymised within thirty days of the account deletion, except data that must be kept longer by law.
  • Orders, payments and payouts: ten years from the transaction, for accounting obligations and to answer possible disputes.
  • Purchased files: available to the buyer as long as the product and the store exist; deleted with the store or the product.
  • Sign-in sessions: expire after thirty days without activity; email sign-in code: ten minutes; download links sent by email: two hours.
  • Messages sent to creators and to support: twenty-four months.
  • Technical logs (IP address, requests): twelve months at most.
  • Store visits: twelve months.
  • “Improve with AI” generations: twelve months for the proposed page and the creator’s instructions. Only the record of the AI credits spent (date, product, who asked for it, number of credits) remains afterwards, for as long as the store exists.
  • Audience measurement of our sites: with no time limit, in a form that does not make it possible to recognise a person from one day to the next.

7. How we protect it

All communications with Kivoo are encrypted (HTTPS). There is no password to steal. Sign-in codes are stored hashed and expire after ten minutes; session identifiers are kept hashed on the server and the session cookie cannot be read by scripts. Product files are private and only reachable through signed links, valid for a few minutes, generated after a purchase.

Sign-in codes, session identifiers, third-party sign-in tokens and payout details are never written to our logs. Access to data is limited to the people who need it to run the service and support.

8. Your rights

Depending on the law that applies in your country, you have the right to access, rectify, erase, object to, restrict and port your data, and the right to withdraw your consent at any time when processing relies on it.

You can change your name and language, manage your sign-in methods and delete your account from your dashboard. For any other request, write to support@kivoo.africa from, or mentioning, your account’s email address; we may ask you to confirm your identity. We answer within one month.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the data-protection authority of your country.

9. Cookies and local storage

Kivoo uses no advertising cookies. Kivoo measures store visits itself, without cookies or any lasting identifier, and the audience of its own sites with Umami, which it hosts, also without cookies. Only the following cookies and local-storage items are used:

  • kivoo_session: session cookie, set when you sign in on the kivoo.africa domain and its subdomains. It only contains a random identifier and expires after thirty days without activity or when you sign out.
  • kivoo_oauth_state: temporary cookie set during a sign-in with Google, Facebook or X, to protect the procedure; it expires after ten minutes.
  • NEXT_LOCALE: cookie that remembers the language chosen (French or English) on kivoo.africa.
  • Light or dark theme: preference saved in your browser’s local storage, never sent to our servers.
  • Cart and checkout details: kept in your browser’s local storage while you shop in a store, cleared when the order is confirmed.
  • kivoo-visit (local storage): the current visit to a store, forgotten after thirty minutes of inactivity.
  • kivoo-buyer-country (cookie, one year): the country chosen on a store, for payment methods and price display.
  • kivoo-announcement-views (local storage) and kivoo-announcements-closed (cookie, one year): the announcements of a store already seen or closed.

You can delete these items at any time from your browser settings; you will then need to sign in and choose your language again. A store may also load the measurement tools chosen by its creator (Meta Pixel, Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, TikTok Pixel); they are then the responsibility of that creator and of those services, under their own policies.

10. Minors

Kivoo is not intended for people who lack the legal capacity to enter into contracts in their country. If you believe a minor has given us data without their legal guardian’s permission, write to us: we will delete it.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy when the service or the law changes. The date of the version in force appears at the top of this page. In case of a material change, we inform account holders by email or from the dashboard.

12. Contact

For any question about your data or to exercise your rights, write to support@kivoo.africa.