Privacy policy

What data Africlaunch collects, why, who it is shared with and how to exercise your rights. This page describes how the site actually works on the date shown.

Last updated: 25 October 2026

In short

We do not sell your data. The site only measures its audience, with PostHog, if you accept it, and uses no targeted advertising: a sponsored placement depends on the page shown, never on your profile.
Your email address is never shown publicly. Your profile and what you publish are.
Payments are made with our payment providers: we never receive your card or mobile money numbers.
You can correct your profile and choose your emails from your settings, and delete your account at any time. For anything else, write to contact@africlaunch.com.

1. Who is responsible for your data

The Africlaunch website (africlaunch.com) is published by ECLIPSCO LLC, a company registered in New Mexico (United States), 1209 Mountain Road PL NE, STE R, Albuquerque, NM 87110, USA. It decides how your data is used.

For any question about your data, write to contact@africlaunch.com.

2. The data we collect

We only collect what the site needs to work:

Your account: your email address, your password (never in plain text: only in a hashed form that cannot be turned back into your password), your username and your name. If you sign in with Google or GitHub, that service sends us your email address, your name (and, for GitHub, your username) and an identifier. We never receive your Google or GitHub password, nor your photo.
Your profile: what you choose to add: country, status (based in Africa or in the diaspora), bio, links, photo and cover image.
What you publish: products, launches, posts, comments, reviews and ratings, discussions, replies and communities (the ones you create or join, with your role in them), as well as your votes (including on discussions), who you follow, what you save and your reports. For an organization: its members and the email address of the people you invite to it.
Your payments: for a paid publication or a top-up of your sponsorship wallet: the amount, the currency, the payment provider, the date, the payment status and its reference. For your sponsorship campaigns: budget, spending, impressions and clicks.
Your messages: when you write to the team (contact form, category request, request about a listing created by the team): your name, your email address and your message.
Your preferences: your language and your email choices.

The images you upload (photo, logo, screenshots) are resized and converted by your browser before they are sent. Their metadata, such as the place where a photo was taken, is removed at that step.

The team also creates product listings from public information on the web. They contain no data about any person; we only keep, without showing it, the contact address the company itself displays, so that we can write to it. The whole process is described on a dedicated page.

read “Listings created by the team”

3. What the site measures

The site measures a few things to work and to protect itself:

Launch views: to count unique views, we keep a fingerprint calculated from your IP address and the day. We do not keep the IP address itself.
Sponsored placements: to count impressions and clicks and bill them to the advertiser, we keep a fingerprint calculated from your IP address, your browser and the day. It is deleted after 30 days; only daily totals remain.
Abuse prevention: for some actions (signing in, forgotten password, messages, publishing), your IP address or your account is used as a counter that limits the number of attempts. This counter stays in memory for one hour at most and is not written to the database.
Server log: the application server records each request it receives (date, address called, response, browser type), without your IP address. This log does not yet have a fixed retention period.
Emails sent: for each email, we keep its type, its date, its status and your address in masked form.
Site audience (only if you accept it): if you accept the banner, PostHog records the pages you view (their address without its parameters, and never that of a private page such as email confirmation, forgotten password or claiming a listing), the page you came from, the time spent on each page, your type of device, browser and system, the site language, whether you are signed in or not, and your IP address, from which it infers an approximate country and city. A random identifier, kept in a cookie, lets it recognise the same browser from one visit to the next. We do not link it to your account, your name or your email address; however, the username of a profile you view may appear in the address of the page. We do not record your clicks, your sessions or what you type.
Four anonymous server events: whether or not you accepted the banner, the server sends PostHog four kinds of events that contain nothing about you: a sign-up (by email, Google or GitHub, and whether it comes from an invitation), a published launch (its type and whether it belongs to a person or an organisation), a vote (the launch concerned, never who voted) and a completed payment (the provider, the currency and the amount, never who paid). They carry no account identifier, no name, no email address and no IP address of the person.

4. Why we use it

to create and secure your account, and to sign you in;
to show your profile and what you publish, and to calculate the launch ranking from votes;
to send you the emails linked to your account and the ones you chose (see “Emails”);
to process your payments, publish your paid products and run your sponsorship campaigns;
to moderate the site: handle reports, hide or remove what breaks the rules;
to protect the site against abuse and fraud;
to answer your messages.

We do not sell your data, we do not rent it and we do not use it for targeted advertising.

5. Emails

Some emails are necessary and are always sent: confirming your address, a forgotten password and a change of address.

The others can be set in your settings: the status of your launches, comments on your launches and invitations to an organization (on by default), platform news and the weekly digest (off by default: you choose to receive them). News and the digest also include an unsubscribe link.

Emails are sent by our provider Resend.

6. What is public

Your public profile shows your username, your name, your photo, your cover image, your bio, your country, your status, your links, the date your account was created, your number of followers and the number of accounts you follow. Your products, launches, posts, comments and reviews are public, as is the number of votes on each launch. Public communities, their discussions and their replies are public, with the name of their creator and their number of members; your reputation points and your badges are shown under your discussions. The discussions of a private community can be read only by its members and are not offered to search engines; the list of a community's members is visible only to its moderators.

Never public: your email address, your payments, your wallet, your drafts, what you save, your preferences, the launches and discussions you voted for, and your reports.

Public content can be picked up by search engines and stay in their results for a while after it has been changed or removed.

7. Who we share your data with

We use providers to run the site. Each one only receives what it needs for its task:

Amazon Web Services: hosts the site and its database, on servers located in Ohio (United States).
Cloudflare: stores and delivers the images uploaded to the site, from Western Europe. It also manages our domain name and forwards to the team the messages sent to contact@africlaunch.com.
Resend: sends the site's emails.
Stripe: processes international card payments. You enter your card on Stripe's page; we only receive the result of the payment.
SaSPay: processes mobile money payments. We send it your name and email address along with the amount.
PostHog: measures the audience of the site, on servers located in Europe (Frankfurt), only if you accepted the banner; it also receives the four kinds of anonymous events described above.
Google and GitHub: only if you use them to sign in.

We do not share your data with advertisers. An advertiser only sees the totals of impressions and clicks of its campaigns, never who saw or clicked.

We only disclose your data to an authority if the law requires us to.

8. Where your data is stored

Your data is stored in the United States (Ohio), images in Western Europe and audience measurement data (if you accept it) in Europe, in Frankfurt. Our providers may process it in other countries for their service, for example to send an email or process a payment.

If you live outside the United States, your data is therefore transferred out of your country.

9. How long we keep it

Your account: as long as it exists. When you delete it, it is anonymized (see “Your rights”).
Sponsored placement fingerprints: 30 days.
Abuse counters: one hour at most, in memory.
Links sent by email (confirmation, password, invitation): they expire, then are deleted at the latest 30 days later.
Listings created by the team: until they are claimed or their deletion is requested. The company's contact address is erased as soon as the listing is claimed. After a deletion, we only keep the website's domain name, so that the listing is not created again.
Backups: a copy of the database is made every day and kept for 7 days. Erased data can therefore remain in it for up to 7 days.
Your payments, your messages to the team, view fingerprints, the email log, the server log and audience measurement data: they do not yet have a fixed retention period. We will set one and show it here.

10. Cookies and browser storage

The site uses cookies that are needed for it to work and, only if you accept it, one audience measurement cookie. It uses no advertising cookie. You can change your mind at any time with the “manage cookies” link at the bottom of every page. On the secure site, the names of the sign-in cookies start with __Secure- or __Host-.

authjs.session-token: keeps you signed in. Up to 30 days.
authjs.csrf-token, authjs.callback-url: protect sign-in and bring you back to the right page. For the length of your visit.
authjs.state, authjs.pkce.code_verifier: secure a sign-in with Google or GitHub. A few minutes.
NEXT_LOCALE: remembers the last language you chose. 1 year.
ap_consent: remembers your choice about audience measurement, even if you refused it. 6 months.
ph_…_posthog: only if you accepted: the random identifier of audience measurement, also copied in the browser's local storage. 1 year.
ap_ref: only if you arrive through a member's invitation link: remembers who invited you, so that you follow them when you sign up. 30 days.
account_language, social_created: used right after signing in (your account language, an account created with Google or GitHub). 60 seconds.
admin_session: for the administration team only.

If you are not signed in, the site also keeps in your browser (local storage) the list of announcements you have already seen, so that it does not show them again.

11. Minimum age

Africlaunch is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data about younger people: if you think an account belongs to someone under 18, write to us and we will delete it.

12. Your rights and how to exercise them

From your settings, you can at any time:

correct your profile;
change your email address and your password, if you sign in with an email;
choose the emails you receive;
withdraw your consent to audience measurement, with the “manage cookies” link at the bottom of every page;
delete your account: with your password or, if you sign in with Google or GitHub, with a confirmation link sent to your email address.

Deleting your account anonymizes it: your name, bio, photo and cover image are removed, your email address and sign-in methods are erased, the accounts you follow and your followers are removed, and you can no longer sign in. Your comments, discussions, replies and votes remain, signed “deleted user”, as do your products, your launches and your payment history. You leave your communities: those you own pass to their oldest moderator (or, failing that, their oldest member), or are suspended if there is none.

To get a copy of your data, have everything erased, correct information you cannot change yourself or object to a use of your data, write to contact@africlaunch.com from your account's email address. We may ask you to confirm your identity, and we handle your request within 48 hours.

Full erasure removes everything about you, including your comments, discussions, votes and products, except your payment and wallet history, which we keep without your name or email for accounting. The launches you made for an organization stay with the organization. A discussion that others have replied to has its text erased but remains, so that their replies stay readable. Ask for it before deleting your account: once the account is deleted, we can no longer link it to your address.

You can also contact the data protection authority of your country.

13. Security

The site is only available over an encrypted connection (HTTPS).
Passwords and sign-in tokens are only kept in a hashed form that cannot be turned back into the original.
Your payment details never go through our servers: you enter them with the payment provider.
The administration team signs in with two-factor authentication, and each of its actions is written to a log that cannot be changed.
No system is perfectly secure: if you notice a problem, write to us.

14. Changes to this policy

We update this page when the site changes. The date at the top shows the latest version. For an important change, we let you know by email or with an announcement on the site.

15. Contact us

For any question about your data, write to contact@africlaunch.com or use the contact page.

write to the team

ECLIPSCO LLC, 1209 Mountain Road PL NE, STE R, Albuquerque, NM 87110, USA.