Privacy & POPIA Policy

Version 1.4 · last updated 25 October 2026

Ukweli (“we”, “us”, “our”) is a content-integrity and document-verification service operated by The Orkestra, a company incorporated in South Africa. This policy explains what personal information we process, why, how we protect it, and the rights you have under the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA).

1. The principle that defines Ukweli: we do not keep your documents

Ukweli is a zero-retention service. This is the heart of our privacy posture, not a footnote.

• We never store the documents you submit. When you paste text or upload a PDF/DOCX, the content is held in memory only for as long as it takes to analyse it, then discarded. We do not write your source document to disk or database.
• We store only the analysis result — the structured report (scores, flags, verdict). It contains short excerpts of passages we flagged, but never the full document.
• You cannot re-download your original document from us, because we do not have it.

If you need maximum confidentiality for a pre-publication document, this is the design point that matters: the document leaves our systems the moment the analysis is done.

2. What personal information we process

• Account information — name, email, organisation, role, country (from you, at sign-up or when you join the waitlist).
• Authentication data — login session identifiers and password, managed by our authentication provider, Clerk.
• Analysis results — the structured report for each analysis, including short flagged excerpts of your content, the document title, word count and date.
• Submitted content — the text/PDF/DOCX you submit, processed in memory only, never stored (see §1).
• Billing information — subscription tier and transaction records; we never see or store full card numbers.
• Technical & anti-abuse data — IP address, device fingerprint, browser/user-agent, usage counts.
• Consent records — that you consented, the policy version, and the date.

We do not seek or require special personal information (e.g. health, race, religious or political beliefs). Documents you submit may themselves contain such information; we process that content transiently and do not retain it (§1).

3. Why we process it, and our lawful basis (POPIA)

• Performance of a contract / your request — to run the analyses you ask for and deliver your results.
• Consent — you consent to this policy before your first analysis; you may withdraw it (see §8).
• Legitimate interest — to secure the service, prevent abuse and fraud, and enforce free-tier limits.
• Customer relationship management & product communication — we use your account and contact information (name, email, organisation, role, country) to manage our relationship with you, respond to enquiries, send service and product updates, and — for waitlist members and customers — tell you when Ukweli opens in your market and about relevant features. This uses your account data only, never the content of your documents.
• Legal obligation — to keep records we are required by law to keep (e.g. tax/financial records for billing).

We keep two kinds of data strictly separate. The documents you submit are processed in memory and never stored, and are never used for marketing or any purpose beyond producing your result. Your account and contact details are used to run your account and for the relationship and product communication described above. We do not sell personal information, and you can opt out of non-essential messages at any time.

3A. Media, press and research contacts

We also keep a list of newsrooms, journalists, editors, researchers and civil-society organisations. We use it to send them our Local Government Elections 2026 manifesto analysis.

What we hold. An email address, the name of the outlet or organisation, the type of organisation, the role the address is published for (for example “newsdesk” or “press office”), the web page we found it on, and the date we collected it. For a few people the address is their own, because their organisation publishes it that way.

Where it comes from. Only from addresses the organisation itself publishes, such as contact pages, press-office pages and tip lines. We do not buy lists or collect addresses from social media.

Why we use it. To share our research with people who report on, analyse or work on elections. We are not selling anything. We rely on legitimate interest for this.

Who handles it. We use Supabase to store the list and Resend to send the email. Resend sends from servers in Ireland. Vercel hosts the unsubscribe page.

How to stop it. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and one click is enough. You can also write to hello@ukweli.io. We then keep your address on a do-not-contact list, so that we do not write to you again. That is the only thing we keep.

How long we keep it. Until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it. If you unsubscribe, we keep your address on a do-not-contact list, so that we do not write to you again.

Your rights. You can ask to see what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to our using it, by writing to hello@ukweli.io. You can also complain to the Information Regulator (details in section 10).

3B. Requests for a deeper look (the request form)

We run a short form at ukweli.io/request. A reader uses it to ask us to look more closely at one of the ten themes in the 2026 local government manifestos, or at another topic.

What we hold. What you type into the form: your first name, last name and email address (all required); who you are (required); the themes you tick or the topic you name (one is required); your organisation and municipality (optional); what you want to understand, up to 280 characters (optional); and the kind of help you would find useful (optional). A separate, optional box lets you leave the Ukweli mailing list. We hold anything you write in the boxes, so please do not put in anything you do not want us to keep.

Where it comes from. From you, directly, when you send the form.

Why we use it. To read and respond to your request. We rely on your consent, which you give by ticking the box on the form. We also use your name and email address to send you updates and new folios from Ukweli. If you do not want that, tick the separate, optional box on the form to leave the mailing list. You can still send your request. You can withdraw your consent, or leave the mailing list, at any time by writing to hello@ukweli.io.

If you leave out a required detail. Without your name, email address and who you are, we cannot respond to you, so the form cannot be sent.

Who handles it. We use Supabase to store the requests, on servers in Frankfurt, Germany. Vercel hosts the site. We use Resend to send the mailing-list email. See section 6.

How long we keep it. Your request, meaning the themes and topic, what you wrote, your organisation and your municipality, until 30 November 2026. After that we delete it. If you ticked the box to leave the mailing list, we delete your name and email address then too. If you did not, we keep your name, your email address and who you said you are until you unsubscribe. We keep only anonymous counts of requests, such as how many each theme received.

How to stop the mailing list. Every email has an unsubscribe link. You can also write to hello@ukweli.io. We then keep your address on a do-not-contact list, so that we do not write to you again. That is the only thing we keep.

Your rights. You can ask to see what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or object to our using it, by writing to hello@ukweli.io. You can also complain to the Information Regulator (details in section 10).

4. How your content is analysed (and who else is involved)

To analyse your content we send it to a small number of sub-processors, each receiving only the minimum needed:

• Anthropic (Claude API) — the AI backbone that performs the analysis. Your content is sent to the Claude API for processing. Anthropic does not train its models on data submitted through the API. Processing occurs on Anthropic’s infrastructure in the United States (see §6).
• Brave Search API (Tier 2 and Tier 3 only) — for citation verification we send individual extracted claims or citations, not your whole document, to a web search to check whether sources exist and support the claim.
• Supabase — our database, which stores your account and analysis results (never your source documents), encrypted at rest.
• Clerk — authentication (sign-up, sign-in, sessions).
• A payment processor and a transactional-email provider support billing and report/receipt emails.

We have the operator (processing) agreements POPIA section 21 requires with each sub-processor — for example, Anthropic’s Data Processing Addendum (with Standard Contractual Clauses) is incorporated into its commercial API terms, and our database and authentication providers operate under their standard data-processing terms. Each obliges the operator to keep your information secure and to process it only on our instructions.

5. How long we keep information

• Submitted documents — not retained; processed in memory, then discarded.
• Analysis results — the 5 most recent per account; older results auto-purged. All results purged after 90 days, or sooner if you delete them.
• Account information — for as long as your account is active; deleted on closure, subject to legal record-keeping.
• Billing & consent records — kept as long as required to meet legal and compliance obligations.
• Anti-abuse data — kept for a limited period, then purged.

6. Cross-border transfers

Some sub-processors (notably Anthropic, and possibly Clerk) process data outside South Africa, including in the United States. POPIA section 72 permits this on any of three grounds we rely on: the recipient is bound by an agreement that upholds protection substantially similar to POPIA (the data-processing agreements and Standard Contractual Clauses in §4); the transfer is necessary to perform our contract with you (we cannot analyse your document without sending it to the AI provider); and you consent to this policy before your first analysis. By using Ukweli you acknowledge that your content is processed by these providers for the purposes described.

The request form (section 3B) stores your details with Supabase on servers in Frankfurt, Germany, which is outside South Africa. The recipient is bound by its data-processing terms and by the data protection law that applies there. We rely on POPIA section 72 and on your consent, which you give when you tick the box on the form.

7. How we protect your information

We apply technical and organisational security measures appropriate to the sensitivity of the data: encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest; access controls and row-level security on our database; authentication via a specialised provider (Clerk); the zero-retention design (§1); rate-limiting and abuse prevention; secret management; and least-privilege access. No system is perfectly secure, but our architecture is built so that the most sensitive thing — your document — is never at rest in our systems.

8. Your rights under POPIA

• Access — ask what personal information we hold about you.
• Correction — ask us to correct inaccurate information.
• Deletion — delete analysis results yourself in-app, or request full account deletion.
• Objection — object to processing based on legitimate interest.
• Withdraw consent — at any time (this may mean you can no longer use parts of the service).
• Complain — to us, and to the Information Regulator (§10).

To exercise any right, contact our Information Officer (§10). We respond within any timeframe POPIA requires.

9. Cookies and tracking

Ukweli uses only the cookies and local storage necessary to keep you signed in, remember your preferences, and secure the service (including anti-abuse device fingerprinting). We do not use third-party advertising cookies.

10. Contact and complaints

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your information, you may complain to the South African regulator:

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. On a material change we update the version number and effective date and, where appropriate, ask you to re-consent. The current version always governs.

Operating in Nigeria or Kenya? Market-specific privacy notices for those jurisdictions will be published before Ukweli launches publicly there.