Divisi
This Privacy Policy explains how Codefarm Technologies (Pty) Ltd ("we", "us", "our") collects, uses, stores and shares your information when you use the Divisi app, the website at divisi.africa, our emails and WhatsApp messages, and the partner dashboard (together, the "Service"). It also describes your rights under South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) and the data protection law of the country you live in.
The short version:
- Your farm records are yours. Your diary, fields, tasks and ledger are private to you and the people you add to your farm. Nothing reaches the Hive unless you choose to share it.
- Private messages are private. Only the people in a conversation can read it. We do not read them, sell them or use them for advertising.
- We do not sell your personal information, and no organisation sees your name or your fields unless you agree to it.
- You can delete your account from the app at any time, without contacting us.
What We Collect
Account and profile
- Phone number — your sign-in identifier. We use it to send your one-time sign-in code on WhatsApp.
- First, middle and last name, and a username
- Email address (optional)
- Date of birth and gender (optional). Used to personalise the app and, only as age bands and totals, in the statistics described under Partner programmes.
- Profile picture (optional)
- Country, timezone, preferred language and measurement units
- Clan or family totem (optional, used to suggest usernames)
- A referral code for your account, and which share link or code brought you to Divisi
- Your settings: notification choices, quiet hours and privacy switches
Your farm
- Farm location — the GPS point or boundary you pin. We use it for weather, growing seasons, crop suitability and planting dates.
- Farm name, address, size, soil, water source, and your zones and field boundaries
- Crops, planting dates, stages, tasks and plans
- Diary entries, observations, pest and disease notes, and the photos, videos, voice notes and documents you attach
- Farm ledger — income, expenses, quantities and prices you record
- The people you add to your farm and their role (owner or manager)
The Hive
- Posts, questions, answers, comments and reactions you publish, and records you choose to share from your diary
- Who you follow and who follows you
- People you block (kept private) and reports you file
- Weekday Quiz answers and scores, and the leagues you join
- Share links you create and visits to them
Private messages
- Messages you send and receive, including photos, videos and documents, replies, reactions and edits
- Message requests, and whether you accepted or declined them
- When a message was sent, delivered and read
- When you were last active in the app, so the people you talk to can see whether you are around
- Fields or crops you share into a conversation, and when you stop sharing them
Messages are encrypted in transit between your phone and our servers, and are stored on our servers so they reach all of your devices and survive a lost phone. They are not end-to-end encrypted. See How we treat private messages for who can read them.
Your contacts (only if you allow it)
If you let Divisi see your contacts, the app sends the phone numbers in your address book so we can tell you which of them already use Divisi and let you know when one joins. Contact names are never uploaded. We store each number only as a one-way scrambled code, never as the number itself, and use it for nothing else. The codes are deleted when you delete your account. You can refuse or withdraw the contacts permission in your phone's settings.
Marketplace (when it launches)
When the Divisi marketplace opens we will collect what you put into it: listings (what you are selling, quantity, price, photos and an approximate location), what you ask to buy, and the messages between buyers and sellers. We will update this policy before we collect anything beyond that, such as payment information.
Device, usage and diagnostics
- A notification ID for your device, so we can send it notifications, and the list of devices signed in to your account
- App and website analytics — screens and pages viewed, features used, how you arrived, app version, device model and operating system, collected with the help of analytics providers. When you are signed in we tag these events with your account's random ID — never your phone number, name or email.
- Crash and error reports — technical details of what went wrong in the app or on our servers
- Server logs: IP address, browser or app version, the address requested, and timestamps
Website visitors, subscribers and partners
- Your email address and the updates you ask for when you subscribe to our newsletter, a planting calendar reminder or a download
- Whatever you send us through the contact form, a brochure request or a partner application
- For partner organisations: the names, work contact details and roles of staff who use the partner dashboard, and billing records
How We Use Your Information
We use your information to:
- Run the Service: sign you in, keep your records in step across your devices, and deliver your messages
- Give advice for your own field: crop suitability, planting windows, tasks, weather and alerts
- Run the Hive: show your posts, suggest people to follow and rank the feed
- Send the notifications, emails and WhatsApp messages you have chosen to receive
- Keep people safe: act on reports, stop spam and fraud, and enforce our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines
- Find and fix bugs, and learn which features help farmers
- Produce totals for partner programmes, never identifying anyone without their consent
- Meet our legal obligations
Under POPIA we rely on: performing our agreement with you (running the Service), your consent (contacts, location, notifications, marketing email, partner programmes), our legitimate interests (safety, analytics, improving the Service), and legal obligations. You can withdraw consent at any time; doing so does not affect what was done before.
We do not use your private messages, farm records or ledger for advertising, and we do not use them to train artificial intelligence models.
Who Can See What
| What | Who can see it |
|---|---|
| Diary, fields, tasks, plans and ledger | You and the people you add to your farm. Nobody else, unless you share a record. |
| Hive posts, answers, comments and records you share | Anyone, including people without the app. Public posts can appear on divisi.africa and in search engines. |
| Your profile (name, username, photo, crops, followers) | Anyone, when your profile is Public. Set it to Private, and hide your connections or crops, in the app's privacy settings. |
| Private messages | Only the people in the conversation |
| A field or crop shared into a conversation | The people in that conversation, until you stop sharing it |
| Read receipts and when you were last active | People you have an accepted conversation with |
| Your farm's exact location | You and your farm's team. Nearby-farmer suggestions use it without showing anyone your distance or coordinates; turn them off with the nearby discovery switch. |
| Your Weekday Quiz score | Mutual connections who also played, unless you turn score sharing off |
| Marketplace listings (when launched) | Anyone using the marketplace, with an approximate location, never your exact farm point |
Photos and files on private records and in messages are stored at long, unguessable web addresses. Anyone given one of those addresses can open the file, so do not forward a link you want to keep private.
How We Treat Private Messages
- Someone you are not connected with can send you a message request. Nothing they send reaches your inbox until you accept, and you can decline.
- If either of you blocks the other, the conversation stops and neither of you can message the other.
- For 15 minutes after sending you can edit a message or unsend it, which removes its text and attachments for everyone. Delete for me hides a message only from your own view.
- Our staff do not read your messages. We only look at a conversation when someone in it reports it to us, to investigate abuse, fraud or a threat to someone's safety, or when the law requires us to.
- Automated checks may scan messages for spam, scams and malware to protect you.
Partner Programmes
Organisations such as NGOs, government extension services and contract-farming companies can run programmes on Divisi. This is how our free app is paid for, and it follows strict rules:
- Totals only, without your consent. A partner may see counts and totals for a district or ward — for example how many farmers are growing maize and at what stage. We never show a total drawn from fewer than 10 farmers, and it never includes a name, phone number or field.
- Your fields, only with your consent. A partner sees your name and the details of a specific field only if you join their programme and agree to what the programme will see. We keep a copy of exactly what you agreed to.
- Never your ledger. No partner can see your income, expenses or prices, at any level.
- Leave at any time. Send STOP to Divisi on WhatsApp to end every partner's access to your fields at once, or email us.
Service Providers We Use
We use a small number of carefully chosen service providers to run Divisi. They process data only on our instructions and only to provide the Service, under agreements that require them to keep it confidential and secure:
| Type of provider | Purpose | Data involved |
|---|---|---|
| Sign-in codes, notifications, partner programme messages | Phone number, message content and delivery status | |
| Mobile notification services | Delivering push notifications to your phone | Device notification ID, notification content |
| Analytics and diagnostics providers | Understanding how the app and website are used, and finding and fixing errors | Usage events, device and browser details, approximate location, account ID |
| Hosting, storage and content delivery providers | Running our servers, storing files and delivering them quickly | All data held by the Service, including photos, videos and documents |
| Security providers | Protecting the website and forms from attacks and bots | IP address, browser details |
| Email delivery provider | Sending the emails you asked for | Email address, name, email content, opens and bounces |
| Weather and map data providers | Forecasts for your farm and maps in the app | Farm location (coordinates only, no name), the map area viewed |
To ask which providers currently process your data, email us.
Beyond these providers and partner programmes, we share personal information only when you ask us to, when the law requires it (for example a valid court order), to protect someone's safety, or with a company that takes over Divisi — which would remain bound by this policy.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
International transfers
Some of these providers store or process data outside your country, including in the European Union and the United States. Where that happens we rely on the provider's contractual commitments to protect it to a standard comparable with POPIA.
How Long We Keep Your Data
- Your account and everything it owns — for as long as your account exists. When you delete it, it disappears from Divisi immediately and is erased for good after 30 days (see below).
- Private messages — until the sender unsends them or either account is erased. Erasing your account erases the messages you sent, for everyone in the conversation.
- Records a partner programme holds — what you agreed to is kept as proof of your consent for as long as the programme needs it to show it acted with your permission.
- Email subscriptions — until you unsubscribe, using the link in any email
- Server logs — 90 days
- Analytics — for a limited period, then deleted or reduced to totals
- Totals and statistics that identify nobody may be kept after your account is deleted
- We keep what the law requires us to keep, such as invoices, for as long as it requires
Your Rights
Under POPIA, and similar laws in the country you live in, you have the right to:
- Access the personal information we hold about you
- Correct inaccurate or incomplete information
- Delete your account and personal information
- Object to processing, including for direct marketing
- Withdraw consent you have given, such as for contacts or a partner programme
- Complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa or the data protection authority in your country
Most of this you can do yourself in the app. For anything else, email developers@codefarm.africa. We will reply within 30 days.
Deleting your account
Open Profile in the app and choose Delete account. Your account, posts and profile disappear from Divisi straight away, and every device is signed out. For 30 days you can change your mind by signing in again and restoring the account. After 30 days your account and the data it owns are erased for good. Copies in our backups are overwritten on their normal cycle.
Getting a copy of your data
You can see and edit most of your data in the app. To get a full copy, email developers@codefarm.africa and we will send it within 30 days.
Security
There are no passwords to steal: you sign in with a one-time code sent to your WhatsApp. Each device gets its own session, which lasts until you sign out or remove that device from another one — see and remove your devices in the app. All traffic between your device and Divisi is encrypted, and access to our systems is limited to the people who need it.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information, we will tell you and the Information Regulator as the law requires.
Children
Divisi is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If you believe a child has an account, contact us and we will delete it.
Changes to This Policy
We will update this policy as Divisi changes — for example before the marketplace starts taking payments. We will tell you about important changes in the app or by email before they take effect. The date at the top of this page shows the current version.
Contact Us
For privacy questions, data requests, or to exercise your rights:
- Email: developers@codefarm.africa
- Post: Codefarm Technologies (Pty) Ltd, 26 Derrick Drive, Heritage Park, Somerset West, Western Cape 7130, South Africa
- Or use our contact form
Information Officer: developers@codefarm.africa (as required by POPIA section 55)
