Privacy Policy

1. INFORMATION WE COLLECT

We may collect the following categories of information:

• Account and profile information, including your name, email address, optional profile picture, gender, and other profile details you choose to provide.
• Activity data, including walk and journey history, destination monitoring events, arrival check-ins, cancellations, Safe Zone configuration, and related alerts.
• Location data, including precise GPS in the foreground and, with your explicit consent, in the background when the App is closed or not in use. This includes safety heartbeats, live location sharing you enable, anonymous nearby-user presence, and walk share links. Location is not 100% reliable.
• Trusted contact details: for mutual App contacts, identifiers such as name, email, and connection status; for SMS-only emergency contacts and extra verified numbers, phone numbers you provide. You are responsible for having permission to give us those details.
• Optional emergency medical information you choose to save in the App (for example blood type, allergies, conditions, medications, and short notes). See Emergency Medical Information below.
• Device information, including device type, operating system, App version, push notification tokens, and, while safety monitoring is active, optional battery level and network type sent with heartbeats.
• Notifications and communications, including in-app notification records and records of safety SMS or push messages we send on your behalf (for example journey start, end, cancel, and SOS).
• User-generated content, including profile content, reports (including Verify My Ride vehicle and number-plate reports), comments, and hotspot pins.
• Usage analytics, including feature interactions and crash reports used to improve the service.

2. HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

We use personal information to:

• Provide and maintain personal safety features, including walks and destination monitoring, Safe Zone geofencing, heartbeats, SOS, and related tools.
• Store optional emergency medical information you enter so you can retrieve, edit, or delete it while signed in. We do not share those fields with other users or trusted contacts.
• Verify your identity, keep your account secure, and complete onboarding (including acceptance of Terms and this Policy under POPIA).
• Send in-app notifications and push notifications about walks, safety alerts, check-ins, trusted-contact activity, and account activity. You can manage non-emergency notification types in the App settings. Emergency SOS and critical safety alerts are always delivered if technically possible.
• Notify trusted contacts by push and/or SMS when you start, end, or cancel a journey, leave a Safe Zone during monitoring, trigger SOS, or otherwise activate a feature that is designed to alert them.
• Show accepted App trusted contacts each other's Safe Zones, and share live location only with contacts for whom you enable that option.
• Show optional anonymous nearby-user dots without revealing identities.
• Fetch and display Community Alerts (safety news previews) and open full articles on news.safewalks.co.za.
• Show signed-in users factual counts and lists of user-reported community incidents near a place they search. Reporter identity and exact reporter location are not shown. This is not a safety rating of an area.
• Show signed-in users user-submitted Verify My Ride vehicle and number-plate reports associated with a registration they search. Reporter identity is not shown. These reports are generated by users and are not independently verified as fact by SafeWalks.
• Enforce our Terms of Service and investigate reports of misuse.
• Improve the App through aggregated and anonymised analytics.

We do not sell or rent your personal information to third-party advertisers.

3. LOCATION DATA

Location is central to SafeWalks safety features. GPS, networks, and devices are not always accurate or available. Location is not 100% reliable. We collect and use location data only after you grant permission and accept our in-app location disclosure.

• Foreground location is used while the App is open for walk and destination tracking, Safe Zone setup, Emergency SOS, live sharing you have enabled, and optional nearby-user presence.
• Background location, where permitted, is used so SOS detection, Safe Zone geofencing, heartbeats, destination monitoring on an active walk, and opted-in live location can continue when the App is closed or not in use. On Android, a persistent notification is shown while background location is active.
• Heartbeats periodically send coordinates (and optional battery or network status) while monitoring is active.
• Live location sharing is opt-in, per accepted App trusted contact. SMS-only contacts do not receive in-App map sharing.
• If you create a private walk share link, anyone with that link can see live location and related journey information until the walk ends, is cancelled, or the link expires.
• Anonymous nearby users, if enabled, share a coarse or anonymized position without showing identities.
• You may limit location to "While using the app" or revoke access entirely in your device settings. Features that depend on background location may then be limited or disabled.
• Location data from completed walks and SOS events is retained for thirty (30) days for safety review, then permanently deleted (precise GPS coordinates are cleared automatically).
• We never sell or monetise your location data, and we do not use it for advertising.

4. TRUSTED CONTACTS

You control whom you trust. SafeWalks does not verify that a contact is who they claim to be, that they will respond, or that they are a safe person to notify.

• Mutual App contacts: both people must accept. Accepted App contacts can see each other's Safe Zones. Monitoring still belongs to the zone owner. They may also receive journey start, end, and cancel updates, Safe Zone escalation, and SOS, according to your settings.
• SMS-only contacts: phone numbers you add for emergency SMS (including extra verified numbers). They receive SMS for SOS and other events we send by text. They do not get in-App Safe Zone maps, live location sharing, or other App-contact features.
• You must only add contacts you are allowed to contact. You are responsible for that choice and for any information they then receive.
• A contact can screenshot, copy, or forward information we send them. We cannot control how they use it after delivery.

5. EMERGENCY MEDICAL INFORMATION

You may optionally save limited emergency medical details in the App, such as blood type, allergies, medical conditions, medications, and short emergency notes. This is voluntary. You can leave any field blank, mark a list field as none, or provide only what you want stored.

• This information is private to your SafeWalks account. It is not shown on your profile, walks, maps, search, chat, Community Alerts, or to other users, trusted contacts, or SOS recipients.
• We do not include medical field values in analytics, crash reports, application logs, or push or SMS notification content.
• We treat this as special personal information (health information) under POPIA. We process it only because you choose to provide it, so that you can retrieve, edit, or delete it while signed in.
• Medical fields are encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM and transmitted over TLS. Only you can view them in the App while signed in to your account.
• SafeWalks does not verify medical information. It is not a medical record, not clinical advice, and not a substitute for a doctor, hospital, or emergency medical service.
• You can edit or delete this information at any time in the App without deleting your account. It is also permanently erased when you delete your account.

6. COMMUNITY ALERTS AND SAFETY NEWS

Community Alerts shows South African safety and community headlines. In-App you see previews. Full articles are hosted on news.safewalks.co.za.

• Headlines and previews are retrieved through our servers from a third-party news aggregator (NewsAPI) and from third-party publishers. SafeWalks does not write, fact-check, or control those articles.
• We do not warrant that news is complete, timely, or accurate. It is not an official emergency alert and is not a substitute for SAPS, municipal, campus, or other official notices.
• Opening a full article may take you to our news site or a publisher page. Those sites have their own privacy practices.
• We do not sell your identity to publishers. The aggregator is queried by our backend to build the feed.

7. DATA SHARING

We do not sell your personal data. We may share limited information only in the following circumstances:

• Medical information is not shared: optional emergency medical fields you save stay private to your account. They are not sent to other users, trusted contacts, SOS recipients, walk share-link viewers, or Community Alerts.
• With trusted contacts you designate: alerts, location, Safe Zones (accepted App contacts only), journey updates, and SOS content. Sharing is user-controlled, but once sent we cannot retrieve it from their devices or SMS inboxes.
• With share-link viewers: live location and ETA during an active walk, only when you generate and share a private link.
• With other opted-in nearby users: an anonymized nearby presence only, not your name.
• With other signed-in users: factual community incident reports near a searched place, without reporter identity. User-submitted Verify My Ride vehicle and number-plate reports, without reporter identity. Those vehicle reports are not independently verified as fact by SafeWalks.
• With law enforcement: when required by law, court order, or to prevent imminent harm.
• With service providers: cloud hosting, push notification delivery, SMS providers (to deliver texts to numbers you provided), maps, authentication, crash reporting, and a news aggregator for Community Alerts, under appropriate data processing arrangements.

8. DATA RETENTION

• Account data, trusted-contact connections, and Safe Zone configuration are retained for as long as your account is active. Optional medical information is retained only while you keep it saved. You can delete it on its own in the App, and it is also permanently erased when you delete your account (audit logs may be retained without identifying you).
• Walk history metadata (route names and times) is retained while your account is active and removed when you delete your account.
• Precise location coordinates from completed or cancelled walks are deleted thirty (30) days after the walk ends. Stale safety-heartbeat location points are cleared on the same schedule.
• Safe Zone alerts, in-app notifications, and related safety event records are retained while your account is active and deleted when the account is deleted, except where we must keep a record to investigate abuse or comply with law.
• Community Alerts articles are third-party content fetched or cached to display the feed. They are not your personal information.

9. DATA SECURITY

We implement reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal information, including encryption in transit, encryption of sensitive data at rest where applicable, and access controls on a need-to-know basis. Emergency medical fields are stored with field-level AES-256-GCM encryption.

In the event of a personal information breach affecting South African users, we will notify affected users and, where required, the Information Regulator in accordance with POPIA.

10. YOUR RIGHTS UNDER POPIA

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA) of South Africa, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or object to processing of your personal information, and to request your data in a commonly used machine-readable format where applicable.

To exercise these rights, contact our Information Officer at [email protected] or use in-app Help & Support.

Account deletion: Delete Account · Data deletion: Request Data Deletion

11. THIRD-PARTY SERVICES

The App and websites may integrate or link to third-party services such as maps, authentication providers, cloud hosts, push notification vendors, SMS providers, crash reporting, emergency information resources, a news aggregator (NewsAPI), and third-party publishers. We are not responsible for the privacy practices, availability, or content of those third parties. You should review their policies separately. SafeWalks is not a public emergency service.

12. CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated through the App. Continued use of SafeWalks after an updated Policy is posted constitutes acceptance of the revised Policy.

13. CONTACT

For privacy-related enquiries: