Privacy Policy

UAN World ("UAN," "we," "us," "our") is the editorial brand of Unfiltered Africa Network, an AI-powered, Pan-African media platform. This Privacy Policy explains what personal data we collect, why we collect it, how we use and share it, and the rights you can exercise.

It covers our website at uanworld.com, our newsletters, our mobile and partner distribution surfaces, our contributor and tip-line intake systems, our advertising and commercial operations, and any other product or service that links to this policy.

We process personal data in compliance with applicable law in each jurisdiction we operate in, including the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) 2023 and NDPR, the South Africa Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), the Kenya Data Protection Act, the Ghana Data Protection Act, the EU/UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) where it applies to readers in those territories, and other Pan-African data-protection frameworks.

We collect personal data in the following categories.

• Account data. If you create an account, we collect your name (or display name), email address, password (stored only as a salted hash), and, optionally, profile preferences. We log sign-in events, IP address at sign-in, device fingerprint, and session identifiers for security purposes.
• Newsletter subscribers. Email address, subscription date, vertical preferences, engagement events (open / click) where measurable.
• Contributors. Per our tiered contributor system, varying levels of identity, credential, and conflict-of-interest data. Anonymous Tipsters submit through channels that store no identifying metadata.
• Comments and other user-submitted content. The content you submit and the metadata attached to it (timestamp, account identifier where applicable).
• Reader analytics. Anonymised, aggregated page-view data via privacy-first analytics (Plausible). No cross-site tracking, no advertising cookies, no fingerprinting.
• Advertising and partnerships. If you contact us as an advertiser, partner, or syndication client, we collect business contact information and correspondence.
• Tip-line and source-protection intake. Material you submit through secure intake channels is treated under our Source Protection Statement (see Section 10). We deliberately minimise the data we hold here.
• Technical data. Server access logs (IP, user agent, request path, timing) retained for short periods solely for security, abuse detection, and operational diagnostics.
• Cookies and similar technologies. See Section 05.

We do not knowingly collect special-category data (health, religion, sexual orientation, biometric, genetic, political opinion, trade-union membership) about readers. Where such data necessarily appears in journalistic material we hold, it is processed under the journalism exemption available under the relevant data-protection framework, subject to the safeguards described in this policy.

We rely on the following lawful bases, depending on the purpose.

• Performance of a contract. To provide account access, deliver paid or subscribed services, and fulfil contributor agreements.
• Consent. For optional newsletter subscriptions, non-essential cookies, and direct marketing where consent is required by law. You can withdraw consent at any time.
• Legitimate interests. To operate, secure, and improve our services; to prevent fraud and abuse; to communicate with readers about our journalism; to defend our legal rights; and to support our editorial mission. Where we rely on legitimate interests, we balance them against your rights and offer ways to object.
• Journalism, art, literature, and academic research exemptions. For personal data processed for journalistic purposes, applicable law provides limited exemptions from certain data-protection obligations. We rely on these where strictly necessary to publish accurate, public-interest journalism, subject to the safeguards in our Editorial Standards and Source Protection Statement.
• Legal obligation. To comply with applicable law, court orders, and properly served legal process; to maintain editorial accountability and audit records; to respond to regulatory enquiries.

UAN World is an AI-powered media platform. AI assists with signal detection, research aggregation, source-credibility scoring, claim extraction, fact-checking support, transcription, translation, draft scripting, and asset planning.

Your personal data is not used to train third-party AI models. We use commercial AI providers under terms that prohibit them from using our editorial content and our users' personal data for model training without consent. Where we use open or self-hosted models, the same standard applies.

AI does not make decisions about you that produce legal effects or similarly significant effects, and we do not use AI for automated profiling of readers. Every published story is reviewed and approved by a human editor; AI assists, it does not decide.

Where AI is used in a way that touches user-facing decisions (for example, comment moderation), a human review path is always available — write to privacy@uanworld.com.

We use cookies and similar technologies sparingly. They fall into four categories.

• Strictly necessary. Required for the site to function — authentication, session integrity, security, and CSRF protection. These cannot be turned off.
• Preference. Remember your settings (dark mode, language, vertical filters). Set only after you interact with those settings.
• Analytics. We use Plausible Analytics, which is cookieless and does not track individual users across sites. Aggregate counts only.
• Advertising. If we ever serve targeted display advertising, we will obtain consent first via our consent banner and update this policy with the relevant disclosures. Today we do not run cross-site behavioural advertising.

You can manage cookie preferences at any time through the consent banner or through your browser settings. Blocking cookies may impair functionality.

We share personal data only as described below.

• Service providers acting on our behalf. Hosting (Vercel and AWS), email delivery, payment processing (where applicable), customer support tooling, AI inference providers, content delivery networks, error monitoring, and privacy-first analytics. Each is contractually bound to process personal data only on our instructions and to apply appropriate security measures.
• Editorial subjects, on the record. If you contact us with comment in response to a story, we may quote and attribute you per our Editorial Standards. We do not "out" sources or contacts you intend to keep private — see our Source Protection Statement.
• Law-enforcement or regulators. Only where required by valid, properly served legal process. We notify you where lawful to do so and we resist over-broad requests. We do not voluntarily disclose source-identifying data.
• Corporate transactions. If UAN World is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or asset transfer, personal data may transfer with the transaction, subject to confidentiality protections and applicable law. We will notify you of material changes affecting how your data is handled.

We do not sell personal data. We do not share personal data with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

UAN World operates across Pan-African hubs and diaspora bureaus. Personal data may be processed in countries other than the one you reside in, including the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, and African Union member states.

Where personal data is transferred from a jurisdiction with cross-border restrictions (e.g., EU/UK to a third country, Nigeria to a country without adequate protection, South Africa under POPIA Chapter 9), we rely on appropriate safeguards including Standard Contractual Clauses, adequacy decisions where available, or other lawful transfer mechanisms.

You can request a copy of the transfer safeguards we rely on by writing to privacy@uanworld.com.

We retain personal data for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this policy, after which it is deleted, anonymised, or archived securely. Key periods:

• Newsletter subscribers: until you unsubscribe.
• Account data: until you delete your account, plus a limited retention period for fraud-prevention and accounting where required.
• Comments and submitted content: as long as the associated story is published, plus a reasonable post-publication archive period.
• Editorial audit logs: indefinite. These are an accountability requirement of independent journalism and cannot be deleted on user request.
• Tip-line submissions and source-protection data: minimised at collection; non-essential identifiers are not stored. See the Source Protection Statement.
• Server access logs: short retention (typically 30–90 days) for security and operations.
• Legal-hold data: retained for the duration of the legal matter and any subsequent limitation period.

Subject to applicable law and to the editorial-accountability and journalism exemptions described elsewhere in this policy, you have the following rights:

• Access. Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Rectification. Ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Erasure ("right to be forgotten"). Ask us to delete personal data where we no longer have a lawful basis to keep it. This right does not extend to editorial content already published in the public interest, nor to audit logs required for accountability.
• Restriction. Ask us to limit how we process your data while a dispute is resolved.
• Portability. Receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format where the legal basis is consent or contract.
• Objection. Object to processing based on legitimate interests, and object at any time to direct marketing.
• Automated decision-making. Where applicable, request human review. UAN does not make automated decisions about readers that produce legal or similarly significant effects.
• Withdraw consent. Where we rely on consent, withdraw it at any time without affecting prior lawful processing.
• Complain to a regulator. See Section 14.

To exercise any right, write to privacy@uanworld.com with sufficient information to verify the request relates to your own data. We respond within the statutory period (typically 30 days under NDPA / GDPR), and may extend by a further reasonable period for complex requests, telling you why.

Information submitted to UAN through secure tip-line and source-protection channels is governed by our Source Protection Statement. We deliberately minimise personal data at the point of intake, we resist demands to identify confidential sources, and we operate end-to-end encrypted channels where possible.

Confidential source data is not made available under standard data-subject access requests, because granting such access would frustrate the purpose for which the data was provided and could put sources at risk. This is an explicit exemption recognised in most modern data-protection frameworks for journalistic and public-interest processing.

If you believe you may have submitted material to us and want it removed, write to legal@uanworld.com (not privacy@) and reference the channel you used. We will handle the request through our source-protection process.

UAN World is a general-audience publication and not directed at children under 13 (or the equivalent local age threshold). We do not knowingly collect personal data from children without verifiable parental or guardian consent.

The UAN Kids lane is a separately governed product, designed for age-appropriate content and subject to additional safeguards including stricter contributor verification, no behavioural advertising, and parental-consent flows for any account-based features. The Kids lane has its own privacy supplement which prevails over this policy where they conflict.

If you believe a child has provided personal data to us without appropriate consent, contact privacy@uanworld.com and we will take prompt action.

We apply industry-standard technical and organisational measures to protect personal data against unauthorised access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. Measures include:

• TLS encryption in transit; encryption at rest for sensitive stores.
• Salted password hashing and short-lived session tokens.
• Principle of least privilege for staff access, with audit logs.
• Secure software-development practices, dependency scanning, and timely patching.
• Vendor security review for all material service providers.
• Incident-response procedures, including notification to affected users and regulators where required by law.

No system is perfectly secure. If we discover a personal-data breach that is likely to result in a risk to your rights, we will notify you and the relevant regulator in line with applicable law (within 72 hours under GDPR/NDPA where the threshold is met).

We may update this policy as our products, technology, and applicable law evolve. Material changes — changes that affect what data we collect, how we use it, or who we share it with — are notified to registered users by email or in-product notice at least 30 days before they take effect, except where shorter notice is required by law.

Each version is logged in the version history below. Continued use of UAN World after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated policy, but it never overrides the rights granted to you by applicable law.

For privacy enquiries, to exercise any right under this policy, or to raise a concern, contact our privacy team:

• Privacy and data rights: privacy@uanworld.com
• Legal notices and source protection: legal@uanworld.com
• General enquiries: info@uanworld.com

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to your data-protection regulator. For Nigeria: the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC). For South Africa: the Information Regulator. For the EU/UK: your national supervisory authority. For other jurisdictions: the relevant national data-protection authority.

Where required, our designated representative for data-protection purposes will be named in this section before public launch.