Privacy policy

Chirimwa is built by the Faculty of Computer Engineering at the University of Zimbabwe. For the purposes of the Cyber and Data Protection Act [Chapter 12:07] (Act 5 of 2021), the Faculty is the data controller — it decides what is collected and what it is for.

The Act is administered by the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ), which it appoints as the Data Protection Authority. Section 9 below has our contact details and how to complain to POTRAZ.

Section 15 of the Act requires us to tell you this when we collect it. This is all of it — nothing is gathered that is not listed here.

• ·Your name and email address, and a hashed password — to create your account and sign you in. We never store the password itself.
• ·Your farm name and province, if you give them — both optional, used only to label your records.
• ·Field coordinates you type or drop on the map — to fetch weather, rainfall and satellite imagery for the right ground. These are precise locations of land you farm; treat them as you would any location data.
• ·Sensor readings your devices transmit — soil moisture, temperature, humidity, pH, light, battery voltage and signal strength, each with a timestamp.
• ·Leaf photographs you upload for analysis, and the results returned. We keep a reduced copy of each photo with its result, so that you, and an agronomist if you invite one, can check it later.
• ·Harvest records you enter — yields, dates, crop types and your own notes.
• ·Agronomist reviews, if you invite an agronomist: their name and email address, and the verdicts and advice they record on your scans.
• ·Your consent choices — which version of these documents you accepted, whether you consented to automated processing, and when.

We collect no sensitive information as sections 11 and 12 of the Act define it — nothing about race, ethnic origin, political opinion, religious belief, trade union membership, health, sex life, genetic or biometric data. Please do not put any of that into free-text notes, and do not upload photographs with identifiable people in them.

There is no advertising here, no third-party analytics, and no tracking across other websites.

We rely on your consent, which the Act treats as the ordinary basis for processing. You give it when you create an account, having been shown this policy first.

You may withdraw consent at any time, without explanation and without charge. That does not undo processing already carried out lawfully, but it stops anything further — in practice, closing your account. Section 8 explains what then happens to your data.

Asking an agronomist to check. Under Settings you can invite an agronomist to review what this app tells you — leaf scans, and the fertiliser plan worked out for your field. When you invite them you choose what they may see: leaf scans only, or leaf scans and growing conditions — soil moisture, temperature, humidity, pH, recent rainfall and your fertiliser plan. The wider choice is offered because a photograph alone rarely separates a disease from a nutrient or water problem. Either way, your harvest records, the location of your fields, your devices and your settings are never shared. Their access starts only when they enter the code you give them, you can narrow or remove it at any time, and reviews they have already made stay on your records.

Section 25 of the Act gives you the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing — including profiling — where it produces legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affects you. The exception is where you have consented, or where a law provides for it.

Chirimwa's disease classifications and yield forecasts are produced without a person in the loop, so this applies. That is why signup asks for a separate consent to automated processing, distinct from accepting these documents, and why declining it still gets you an account.

Whether you consented or not, at any time you may:

• ·Withdraw that consent and keep your account. Sensor recording and charts continue; disease classification and yield forecasting stop.
• ·Ask for a human review of any particular result. A person will look at it and explain how it was reached.

What these models are, and what they are not, is set out in section 3 of the terms. The short of it: they estimate, they do not diagnose.

Under Part VI of the Act you may ask us to:

• ·Tell you what we hold about you, and where it came from.
• ·Correct anything inaccurate or incomplete.
• ·Delete data we no longer have a basis to keep.
• ·Stop a use you object to.
• ·Give you a copy of what you put in — though you need not ask: the History page exports every reading as a spreadsheet, whenever you like.

We will answer within 30 days, free of charge. If we refuse something we will say why, and you can take it to POTRAZ.

Where the account holder is a child, the Act provides for these rights to be exercised by a parent or legal guardian.

Sections 28 and 29 of the Act restrict sending personal information to another country. Chirimwa sends some, and you should know exactly what and where.

• ·Field coordinates to Google Earth Engine (United States) and Sentinel Hub (European Union), for satellite imagery of your fields.
• ·Field coordinates to Open-Meteo (European Union), for weather and rainfall at your location.

Your name, email address, sensor readings, photographs and harvest records are not sent to any of them. What crosses the border is a pair of coordinates and a date range.

Where a receiving country has not been assessed as offering an adequate level of protection, section 29 permits the transfer on the basis of your unambiguous consent to it. You give that when you create an account. If you would rather it did not happen, the app still works — you lose the satellite and weather layers, and the water balance falls back to your own sensor readings.

Section 18 requires appropriate security. Passwords are hashed and never stored readably. Sessions are carried in signed, HTTP-only cookies. Each sensor bridge authenticates with its own key, which you can revoke from Settings at any time — the device stops sending immediately.

Sections 19 to 21 require breach reporting. If a breach affects your data we will notify POTRAZ and we will tell you — what happened, what was affected, and what you should do.

Deleting a season deletes its scans, their photos and any agronomist reviews of them.

Your records stay while your account is open, because their value is the comparison between one season and the next.

Close your account and we delete your personal data within 90 days, apart from anything the law requires us to retain. Sensor readings may be kept beyond that only in a form that cannot be traced back to you or your land.

Chirimwa is a university project, and its models get better as they see more real harvests. We may use your data to train and evaluate them.

Anything used this way is stripped of identifiers first — no name, no email address, no precise coordinates. Published results describe patterns across farms, never an identifiable farm. If you would rather your records were left out entirely, tell us and we will exclude them; nothing about your use of the app changes.

To exercise any right in section 5, withdraw a consent, ask for a human review of an automated result, or raise anything else, write to the Data Protection Officer, Faculty of Computer Engineering, University of Zimbabwe, Mount Pleasant, Harare — or use the contact address given to you when your account was created.

If our answer does not satisfy you, you may complain to POTRAZ as the Data Protection Authority. Nothing here removes that right.

Note for whoever operates this deployment. The Act requires most data controllers to register with POTRAZ before processing begins and to notify the Authority of the Data Protection Officer they appoint; the Cyber and Data Protection (Licensing of Data Controllers and Appointment of Data Protection Officers) Regulations, 2024 set out how. Confirm your position and put the officer's real name and contact details above before this page is shown to anyone.

If we change what we do with your data in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and where the law requires it we will ask for your consent again rather than assume it carries over. The date at the top always shows the current version, and the version you accepted is recorded against your account.