Privacy Policy

1.Who we are

Hoodlynk is a marketplace for rental property in Kenya. People use it to find somewhere to live, to list property they own or manage, and to run the tenancies that follow — rent, repairs, inspections and the paperwork between a landlord and a tenant.

This policy covers the Hoodlynk website and the Hoodlynk mobile app. For the purposes of Kenya’s Data Protection Act, 2019, Hoodlynk is the data controller for the information described here. Write to privacy@hoodlynk.com about anything on this page.

2.What we collect, and why

We collect what the thing you are doing needs, and we have tried to say which is which rather than listing everything under one purpose.

Your account

• Email address — this is how you sign in and where we send anything that has to reach you. Required.
• Password — stored only as an Argon2 hash. We cannot read it, and neither can anyone who obtains a copy of the database.
• Name and phone number — optional, and used so that a landlord and a tenant can identify and reach each other once they are dealing with one another.

Identity verification

• A photograph of you and both sides of an identity document — a national ID, a passport or a driving licence, and a proof of address if you send one.

This is only collected if you start verification. It exists because handing over a deposit to a stranger on the internet is the risk this market runs on, and it is reviewed by a person and then left alone. Reviewers see the documents; nobody else does, and they are never shown on your public profile.

Listings and tenancies

• Property details and photographs you publish, including the address and the map position you set. These are public — that is what a listing is.
• Tenancy records — who is renting what, from when, at what rent, what has been paid, repairs raised, inspections carried out and documents exchanged.

Payments

• Payout details — the M-Pesa number or bank account a landlord is paid into.
• Payment records — amounts, dates, references and status.

Card and mobile-money credentials are handled by the payment provider, not by us. We keep the record of the transaction, not the instrument.

Location

• Approximate location from your IP address, looked up through ipinfo.io, so the market opens on the city you are in rather than on an arbitrary one.
• Precise location from your device, only if you allow it when the browser or the app asks, and only to sort listings by distance from where you are.

Neither is stored as a history. We do not keep a record of where you have been.

Using the service

• Messages between you and the other party to a listing or a tenancy.
• Saved searches, bookmarks and likes.
• Technical records — IP address, device and browser, and the requests your client makes. These are how we find faults and how we notice an account being attacked.

3.Why we are allowed to hold it

Under the Data Protection Act, 2019, every use of personal data needs a lawful basis. Ours are:

• Performing a contract — your account, your listings, your tenancy and your payments. We cannot run the service without this data, which is why it is not optional.
• Legal obligation — tax and anti-money-laundering records, and identity verification where it is required of us.
• Legitimate interests — keeping the platform safe, preventing fraud, and fixing what is broken. Weighed against your interests, and limited to what those purposes need.
• Consent — precise device location, and marketing email. Both are opt-in and you can withdraw either at any time, without losing access to anything else.

4.Who else sees it

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

It reaches other parties in four ways:

• Other users, deliberately. A landlord sees the name and contact details of a tenant who applies to them, and a tenant sees the same of their landlord. A public listing shows its property, its price and who listed it.
• Service providers who work on our instructions — hosting (DigitalOcean), email delivery (Mailgun and Resend), maps (Google Maps), IP geolocation (ipinfo.io) and payment processing. Each gets only what its job needs and may not use it for anything else.
• When the law requires it — a court order, a lawful request from the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, or a tax or regulatory obligation.
• If the business changes hands, in which case this policy travels with the data and you will be told before anything about it changes.

Some of those providers are outside Kenya. Where data leaves the country we rely on the safeguards in sections 48 and 49 of the Act: contractual protections with the provider, and processing limited to the purposes set out here.

5.How long we keep it

• Your account — until you delete it, and then as set out in the section below.
• Identity documents — removed when you withdraw a submission. A withdrawn submission leaves behind only the fact that one existed and what happened to it, not the documents.
• Payment and tax records — 5 years after the transaction, as the Tax Procedures Act requires. This survives the deletion of the account they belong to, because the obligation is ours and not yours to waive.
• Tenancy records — for as long as the tenancy runs and while either side could still raise a dispute about it.
• Technical logs — weeks, not years. They exist to diagnose faults, which is a short-lived need.

6.Your rights

Under the Act you may:

• Be told what we hold about you and why — that is this document, and you can ask for more detail.
• Get a copy of your data.
• Correct anything inaccurate. Most of it you can edit yourself in your profile.
• Delete your account and the data attached to it — see below.
• Object to processing based on legitimate interests, and withdraw consent where consent is what we relied on.
• Complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. We would rather you came to us first, but that right does not depend on it.

Write to privacy@hoodlynk.com. We answer within 30 days.

7.Deleting your account

You can ask us to delete your account and its data at any time, from the app — Profile → Settings → Delete account — or from this form, which needs no account and no app. You do not have to say why.

What is deleted: your profile, your email address and phone number, your identity documents, your saved searches, bookmarks and likes, your messages, and the listings you published.

What is kept, and for how long: payment and tax records for 5 years, as the law requires; records of a tenancy that is still running or still disputed, because they belong to the other side of that agreement as much as to you; and the record of your deletion request itself — an address, a date and an outcome — for 2 years, so that we can show the request was honoured.

We complete requests within 30 days. If a live tenancy makes part of it impossible for the moment, we will write and tell you which part and why, rather than quietly doing less than you asked.

8.How it is protected

• Everything travels over HTTPS.
• Passwords are stored as Argon2 hashes, which are designed to be slow to attack and impossible to reverse.
• Sessions are short-lived and can be revoked; changing your password signs out every other session.
• Access to production data is limited to the people who need it, and identity documents are visible only to reviewers.

No system is perfect. If a breach puts your rights at risk we will notify the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner within 72 hours and tell you directly.

9.Children

Hoodlynk is for adults. You must be 18 or over to hold an account, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you believe a child has an account here, write to privacy@hoodlynk.com and we will remove it.

10.Cookies and local storage

We use as few as the service can work with, and none of them are for advertising:

• Session tokens, which keep you signed in. Without them you would sign in on every page.
• A country preference, so the currency and the phone format are right the next time.
• Display preferences, such as dark mode.

Clearing your browser’s storage removes all of them, at the cost of signing you out.

11.Changes to this policy

When this changes we update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how your data is used, we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect — not by quietly editing this page and relying on you to re-read it.