Commuza is a community-management platform provided by SMS ONE (U) LTD ("SMS ONE", "we", "us", or "our"), a company registered in Uganda. We are committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your personal information when you use the Commuza platform.
1. Information We Collect
Personal Information
When you register and use the Service, we may collect:
- Account information: Name, mobile phone number (+255), email address, national ID or passport number.
- Community information: Community name, address, unit assignments, ownership and residency records.
- Financial information: Payment history, invoice records, mobile money transaction references.
- Communication data: Announcements, support tickets, and messages sent through the platform.
- Household records: Vehicle registrations, pets, parking bays, dependants and the access cards issued to your household.
Information Recorded at the Gate
Where a Community uses Commuza for visitor management, its security staff record the following — usually about visitors rather than residents, which is why it is set out separately:
- Visitor passes: The visitor's name, vehicle registration, purpose and the day the pass is valid, created by the resident who invited them.
- Entry and exit records: Who was admitted or refused, at which gate, by which officer, and when.
- Walk-in identity capture: For a visitor arriving without a pass, the officer may record an identity document type and number and photograph both the document and the visitor's face. These are optional: a walk-in with no capture at all is still a valid walk-in.
- Watchlist entries: A person a Community has barred, with the reason recorded by the person who added them.
Calls Between a Resident and the Gate
Where a Community switches voice on, a resident can call their gate and the gate can call a unit. The audio is never recorded. We keep only the record of the call: which unit and which gate, who placed it, when it started, how long it rang, how long it lasted, how it ended, and whether the resident allowed or denied entry during it. A call is placed to a unit or to a gate, never to a person's number — neither party is shown the other's phone number, and the gate handset is never given a directory of who lives where.
Location — Security Staff Only
When a security officer scans a patrol checkpoint, the app takes a single GPS fix at that moment to confirm the officer was standing at the checkpoint. This happens only while the app is open and only for that scan. Neither app requests background location, and residents are not located at all.
Automatically Collected Information
- Device model, operating system and app version, and the browser you use on the web.
- The IP address your request arrives from, in server logs.
- A push notification token for each handset you sign in on, so gate calls and alerts can reach it.
- Which community announcements and Marketplace listings were shown and tapped, counted once per account per day. This is a count, not a profile: there is no advertising identifier and no tracking across other companies' apps or websites.
The mobile apps carry no analytics or crash-reporting SDK. We do not build behavioural profiles and we do not track you across other services.
2. How We Use Your Information
We use your information to:
- Provide, maintain, and improve the Service.
- Process payments and manage billing on behalf of Communities.
- Send transactional notifications (payment confirmations, visitor alerts, OTP codes).
- Operate access control at the gate: verify a pass, record an entry or exit, and ask a resident to approve a visitor who arrived without one.
- Carry calls between a resident and their gate, and record that the call happened and what was decided.
- Show a Community's own announcements and Marketplace listings, and count how many residents saw them.
- Respond to support requests and provide customer service.
- Analyze usage patterns to improve the platform.
- Comply with our legal obligations, including under Tanzania's Personal Data Protection Act, 2022.
3. Data Sharing & Disclosure
We do not sell your personal information. We may share data with:
- Community administrators: Managers and board members can access data for residents within their Community as needed for management functions.
- Payment processors: Pesapal and Yo! Payments for mobile money and card transactions, and partner aggregators such as Sasula where a Community collects through one. Which of these applies depends on what your Community has enabled. Commuza never holds your money.
- Messaging providers: Speeda for SMS and SendGrid for email.
- Push notification services: Firebase Cloud Messaging (Google) on Android and the Apple Push Notification service on iPhone, to deliver a gate call, a visitor request or an announcement to your handset.
- Voice: Agora, which carries the live audio of a gate call between the two handsets. Agora carries the call; it does not record it, and neither do we.
- Hosting: Google Cloud, where the platform runs.
- Legal authorities: When required by law, court order, or to protect the rights and safety of users.
4. Data Isolation & Security
We employ industry-standard security measures including:
- Tenant isolation: Each Community's data is stored in a separate database schema, ensuring strict data separation.
- Encryption: All data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3) and at rest (AES-256).
- Authentication: Sign-in is handled by a dedicated identity server issuing RS256-signed tokens. You can add two-factor authentication or a passkey, and the mobile apps add a 6-digit PIN with optional fingerprint or face unlock on the handset itself.
- Access control: Role-based permissions ensure users only access data they are authorized to view.
- Row-level security: Database-level enforcement prevents cross-tenant data access.
5. Data Retention
We keep your personal information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service. Some categories have their own schedule:
- Financial records: at least 7 years, as the tax and accounting rules of Tanzania require.
- Gate and visitor logs: a window each Community chooses between 6 and 72 months, 24 months by default. Older records are moved to archive storage and then removed.
- A walk-in visitor's identity number and photographs: 30 days by default, after which the number and the photographs are erased. That a walk-in happened, and the category of document shown, remain in the gate log for the window above.
- Call records: 12 months, then archived, and deleted after 24 months.
- Security and audit events: 90 days in the live system, then archived.
Records under a legal hold — for example a lawful request a Community is answering — are kept until the hold is lifted. You may ask us to delete your account and the data associated with it, subject to these obligations.
6. Your Rights
You have the right to:
- Access: Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
- Correction: Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete data.
- Deletion: Request deletion of your personal data, subject to legal obligations.
- Portability: Request your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
- Objection: Object to processing of your data for certain purposes.
To exercise these rights, contact us at hello@commuza.ug.
7. Cookies & Tracking
We use essential cookies to keep you signed in and to remember your preferences. We use no third-party advertising cookies, and no analytics cookies are in use today. If that changes, this policy and the Cookie Policy will say so before it does. You can manage cookies through your browser settings.
8. Children's Privacy
The Service is not directed to individuals under 18 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we become aware that we have collected data from a child, we will take steps to delete it promptly.
9. International Data Transfers
The platform is hosted on Google Cloud in the United States (Iowa), so your data is stored and processed there, not in Tanzania. Our payment, SMS, email, push notification and voice providers each process data in their own jurisdictions. We use providers that offer appropriate contractual safeguards for international transfers. If the hosting region changes, this policy will be updated before it does.
10. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes via email or in-app notification at least 14 days before changes take effect. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page indicates when the policy was last revised.
11. Contact Us
For privacy-related inquiries: