Privacy policy

1. Who we are

Youze Africa is an independent cross-border shopping and logistics service. You order from South African stores' leaflets and online prices; we buy the goods in South Africa, ship them to Harare, and hand them over at 1 Portal Road, Highlands, Harare, or deliver them to you. We are not affiliated with the stores we buy from.

Youze Africa decides how and why your personal data is used, so we are responsible for it under data protection law. This policy covers youzeafrica.com, your customer account at app.youzeafrica.com, the business portal at portal.youzeafrica.com, and our WhatsApp number.

Address

1 Portal Road, Highlands, Harare, Zimbabwe

Email

hello@youzeafrica.com

WhatsApp

+263 71 692 3305

2. What we collect

When you create an account

• Your name, and your email address, your phone number, or both.
• Your password. We never store it as you typed it: we keep only a one-way bcrypt hash, so nobody at Youze can read it.
• Whether your number or email is verified, and when you signed up and last signed in. To verify, we send a 6-digit code by WhatsApp or email. We keep only a scrambled copy of the code, and it expires after 10 minutes.
• If our team gives you an access code to track your orders, we keep it with your record.

When you ask for a quote or place an order

• What you want: product links and names, quantities, the store and price you saw, and our price check at that moment.
• Your name and WhatsApp number, so we can send your quote and order updates.
• Collection or delivery, your delivery area and address, and any note you add for our team.
• Your town, and notes our team adds to your record to handle your orders.
• What you tell us when you tap “I've paid”: the amount, payment method, date and reference. We never ask for card numbers, PINs or passwords for your mobile money or bank account.

When you message us on WhatsApp

• Your WhatsApp number and profile name.
• Your messages and anything you send us: photos, screenshots, documents, voice notes or a location. We save photos, voice notes and files on our server so we can price and buy exactly what you asked for.
• Our replies, and whether they were delivered and read.

When you use our website and portals

• A sign-in cookie keeps you signed in to your account at app.youzeafrica.com (or, for business users, portal.youzeafrica.com) for up to 12 hours. It is the only cookie we set; our website pages set none of their own.
• Your IP address. We count recent requests per address to stop password guessing and spam, and our servers log each request (IP address, page, browser and time) for security and to fix faults.
• A record of key events on your account and orders (sign-ups, sign-ins, verifications, orders placed and payments you report), so we can check what happened if something goes wrong. It never contains passwords or codes.
• In your browser's local storage, on your own device: your cart, your light or dark display choice, and a scrambled key that stops an order being sent twice. Clearing your browser's data for this site removes them.

Business accounts

• For Youze for Business: the company's details, the names and email addresses of its portal users, and its orders, payments and statements.

We don't ask for ID numbers, and we don't use advertising or analytics trackers, social media pixels or similar tools.

3. Why we use it

• To do what you ask: price products, give quotes, take your order, buy it in South Africa, ship it and hand it over.
• To keep you informed: your quote, payment confirmation and every change in your order's status on WhatsApp, and answers to your questions.
• To keep accounts safe: check that a number or email really belongs to you, and stop fraud, spam and password guessing.
• Because the law requires it: accounting and tax records of orders and payments.
• To fix faults and improve the service, using records such as the event log above.

We only message you about your quotes, orders and account. We won't send you offers unless you ask for them, and we never sell or rent your data or share it for advertising.

4. Who handles it for us

We use a few service providers. Each one gets only what it needs to do its job for us.

• Meta (WhatsApp)The WhatsApp Business Platform carries our WhatsApp messages with you, including your number, profile name, messages, photos and files. WhatsApp's own privacy policy also applies to your use of WhatsApp.
• Fly.ioHosts our website, customer and business portals and order system in its Johannesburg, South Africa region. Our database and the photos and files you send us are stored there.
• CloudflareRuns the domain name system (DNS) for youzeafrica.com, which points browsers to our servers. If we switch on its protection service, it will also carry traffic to our sites, see IP addresses and the pages requested, and may set a short-lived security cookie to tell people from bots.
• Anthropic (Claude)When automatic WhatsApp quotes are switched on, a photo or screenshot you send us is passed, with its caption, to Claude, Anthropic's AI, to read the product names and prices in it. Your name and number are not sent. Our team also uses Claude to read stores' printed leaflets, which contain no customer data.
• ResendSends email verification codes when email verification is switched on. It receives your email address and the code.
• Google FontsOur pages load their fonts from Google, so Google receives your IP address and browser details when a page loads.

Some product photos on our website, such as those in live store search, load straight from the store's own image server, which sees your IP address and browser like any website you visit. Nothing else is shared with it.

Inside Youze, your details are seen only by our team, who use them to handle your orders, and whoever delivers your order gets your name, number and delivery address. We share data with authorities only when the law requires it.

5. Stores never get your details

We buy from South African stores in our own name, have the goods delivered to our own hub in South Africa, and ship them to Harare ourselves. The stores do not receive your name, number, address or any other personal data from us.

When we check a product link or search a store's website for you, the store sees a request from our server, not from you.

6. Where your data is stored

Our system and your data are stored with Fly.io in Johannesburg, South Africa. Meta, Cloudflare, Anthropic, Resend and Google may process data in other countries, mainly the United States and Europe, under their own security and data protection commitments. We choose providers that protect personal data to a standard comparable to the laws of Zimbabwe and South Africa.

7. How long we keep it

• Account and contact details: while your account is open. You can ask us to delete them at any time (see Delete your data).
• WhatsApp chats, photos and files: while you shop with us, so we can check what you asked for. We delete them when you ask.
• Orders and payments: six years after the order, for accounting and tax. If you ask us to delete your data, we keep these records without your name or contact details.
• Verification codes: only a scrambled copy is kept. It stops working after 10 minutes, and old copies are deleted as new codes are sent.
• The sign-in cookie: up to 12 hours.
• Request counts used to block abuse: at most one hour, in memory only.
• Server logs: a limited time, under our hosting provider's retention rules.
• Backups: our host keeps daily backups for about a week. Deleted data drops out of them as they are replaced.
• Your browser's local storage: until you clear it.

8. How we protect it

• Our website, portals and order system use encrypted HTTPS connections.
• Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes, and verification codes are scrambled and expire after 10 minutes.
• The sign-in cookie can't be read by scripts on the page, and repeated sign-in attempts are slowed down.
• Our team's system needs its own sign-in, and messages that claim to come from WhatsApp are accepted only when Meta's signature checks out.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach puts your data at risk, we will tell you and the regulator as the law requires.

9. Your rights

You can ask us to:

• Access your data: tell you what we hold about you and give you a copy.
• Correct it: fix anything that is wrong or out of date.
• Delete it: erase your personal data. Delete your data explains how.
• Object to a particular use of your data, or ask us to limit it.
• Withdraw your consent where we rely on it, at any time.

To ask, WhatsApp +263 71 692 3305 or email hello@youzeafrica.com from the number or email on your account, so we can confirm it's you. It's free, and we answer within 30 days. You can change your password yourself in your account.

10. Children

Youze Africa is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account or place an order. If you think a child has given us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will post the new version on this page with a new effective date. If a change affects how we use your data, we will tell account holders on WhatsApp or by email before it takes effect.

12. The law and complaints

We follow Zimbabwe's Cyber and Data Protection Act [Chapter 12:07]. Where South African law applies to what we do there (buying goods, running our hub and hosting our systems), we also follow South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).

If you're unhappy with how we handle your data, please tell us first so we can put it right. You can also complain to Zimbabwe's Data Protection Authority, the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ), or to South Africa's Information Regulator.

13. Contact us

Questions about this policy or your data: email hello@youzeafrica.com, WhatsApp +263 71 692 3305, or visit us at 1 Portal Road, Highlands, Harare.