Your information, handled with care.

Information we collect

We collect only what is needed to introduce you thoughtfully to other members and to keep the community safe.

• Account details: your name, email address and password (held securely by our authentication provider — we never see it).
• Profile details: date of birth, country and city, occupation and industry, languages, faith, hometown and the prompts you answer.
• Photographs you upload, including the professional photograph used as your primary image.
• Preferences: who you would like to meet, age range and openness to distance.
• Activity: introductions shown to you, interest sent or received, saved profiles, matches and messages.
• Membership and payment records held by our payment provider. We store subscription status, never your card details.
• Limited technical information such as sign-in times and cookie consent, used for security.

How we use information

We use your information to run Lobola as a curated, application-based community.

• To review your membership application and verify that you are a real person.
• To prepare a small number of daily introductions matched to your stated preferences.
• To let you send interest, form matches and exchange private messages.
• To send the correspondence you have opted into, such as match and introduction notes.
• To protect members — investigating reports, blocks and misuse of the service.
• To meet our legal obligations and to manage your membership and billing.

How we store information

Your data is held in managed, access-controlled cloud infrastructure. Traffic is encrypted in transit and data is encrypted at rest by our hosting provider.

Photographs are stored in a private storage bucket. They are never publicly addressable; other members only ever see short-lived links created for them at the moment they view your profile.

Passwords are handled entirely by our authentication provider and are stored as salted hashes. Nobody at Lobola — including administrators — can view your password.

Who can access information

Access is limited by design, and enforced by database-level access rules rather than by convention alone.

• Other approved members can see your profile, photographs and prompt answers when you are introduced to one another.
• Only you and the person you are matched with can read your conversation.
• A small number of Lobola staff can review applications, reports and account status where it is necessary to run the community safely. Staff access is recorded.
• Service providers who host our infrastructure, send our email and process our payments, acting on our instructions only.
• We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.

Data retention

We keep your profile for as long as your membership is active. If your application is declined, we keep a minimal record of the decision so we can answer questions about it later.

When you delete your account we remove your profile, photographs, introductions, matches and messages, and anonymise anything we must retain for legal, security or accounting reasons.

Records we are required to keep — such as payment records and safety reports — are retained for the period required by law and then removed.

Your rights

Under UK and EU GDPR and South Africa's POPIA you have clear rights over your information, and Lobola is built so you can exercise most of them yourself, immediately.

• Access: download a copy of your data from Privacy settings in My Profile.
• Correction: edit your profile at any time.
• Erasure: delete your account, and with it your profile, photographs, matches and messages.
• Objection and restriction: withdraw consent to correspondence in your email preferences, or ask us to pause processing.
• Portability: your export is provided as a machine-readable JSON file.
• Complaint: you may complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office, your EU supervisory authority, or the South African Information Regulator.

Contact information

Questions about privacy, or a request you would rather we handled for you, can be sent to privacy@lobola.org. We answer within 30 days, and usually far sooner.

This is professional placeholder wording intended to be reviewed by counsel before launch.