Privacy Policy
Last updated 21 August 2026
Draft, awaiting legal review. This describes how Macad works today and we intend to be held to it, but it has not yet been settled by a Nigerian lawyer. If anything here matters to a decision you're making, email legal@usemacad.com and we'll answer directly.
To run your page we need your name, photo, school and contact details. To pay you we additionally need to check your identity and your bank account.
We never store your BVN or NIN. It is checked and discarded; we keep only a one-way fingerprint that cannot be turned back into the number.
Your page, your name and your photo are public if you share the link. Your phone number, email, bank details and the contact details of people who gift you are never shown publicly: not to signers, not in exports, not in the gallery.
You can ask to see your data, correct it, or have it deleted, and you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.
This summary is not the agreement. Where it and the sections below disagree, the sections below are what applies.
1. Who is responsible for your data
Macad is the data controller for the personal data described here; we decide what is collected and why. We are registered in Nigeria and we are registered with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) as required by the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023.
Our Data Protection Officer can be reached at privacy@usemacad.com. That address reaches a person, not a queue, and is the fastest route for anything in this document.
2. What we collect
| What | When | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Name, photograph, institution, course, set, reveal date | When you create a page | It is the page. This is what visitors see. |
| Phone number and/or email | Sign-up | Signing in, one-time codes, and telling you when a gift arrives. |
| Bank account number, bank, and the account name the bank returns | When you set up payouts | Sending you your money, and checking the account is yours. |
| BVN or NIN and date of birth | Before your first withdrawal | Confirming you are who you say you are. See the next section: we do not keep the number. |
| Signatures, drawings and messages | When someone signs your page | Displaying them on the shirt and in your reveal export. |
| A payer's name, and their phone or email | At checkout | Sending the payer a receipt, and fraud checks. Never shown on the shirt or to the graduate. |
| Payment records: amount, method, reference, status | Every payment | Running the ledger, your dashboard, refunds, chargebacks and our accounts. |
| Delivery address and phone | Ordering merch, or claiming an ambassador reward | Getting the parcel to you. |
| Ambassador application: your pitch, socials, campus | If you apply | Reviewing the application and running the programme. |
| Device and usage data: IP address, browser, pages viewed, errors | Automatically | Keeping the service up, spotting fraud, and fixing what breaks. |
We do not ask for, and do not want, information about your health, religion, politics, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Please do not put it in a message or a page tagline.
3. Your BVN or NIN, specifically
This deserves its own section because it is the most sensitive thing we touch and because most services are vague about it.
When you verify your identity:
- You enter your BVN or NIN and date of birth.
- The number is sent to a licensed Nigerian verification provider, which checks it against the government database.
- The provider returns the name held on that record, and nothing else we ask for.
- The number is then discarded. It is not written to our database, our logs or our backups.
- We store a one-way fingerprint of the number, and the returned name in encrypted form.
The fingerprint exists for exactly one purpose: to answer "has this same identity been used to verify a page belonging to a different person?" That is the check that catches someone using another person's identity to collect gifts. It cannot be reversed into the number, and it is no use to anyone who steals our database.
We keep the returned name because it is what your bank account is checked against before we send you money. Checking against the name you typed would be checking your own answer against itself.
4. Why we use it, and our lawful basis
Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act we must have a lawful basis for each use. Ours are:
- Performing our contract with you: running your page, taking payments, paying you out, delivering merch, handling support.
- Legal obligation: identity verification, anti-money-laundering and anti-fraud checks, tax and accounting records.
- Legitimate interests: keeping the service secure, preventing fraud, understanding how the product is used so we can improve it. We only rely on this where it does not override your rights.
- Consent: appearing in the public Explore gallery, appearing in the public activity feed, and marketing messages. You can withdraw consent at any time and it does not affect anything done before you did.
5. What is public, and what never is
Anyone with your link can see: your name, your photograph, your institution, course and set, your tagline, your reveal date, the signatures on your shirt, and the total amount gifted to you. That is the point of the page.
Two further surfaces publish less, and are separate settings:
- The activity feed on our home page shows a masked first name, the type of event, and a rounded amount. No handle, no message, no signer identity.
- The Explore gallery lists your photograph, name, occasion and a rounded gift total.
Both are on by default and both are switches on your dashboard. They are separate switches because they publish different amounts, and turning one off is not a decision about the other.
Never public, in any circumstance: your phone number, your email, your bank account number, your BVN or NIN or its fingerprint, your date of birth, your delivery address, and the contact details of anyone who gifted you. A payer's contact details are used for their receipt and for fraud checks only; they are encrypted, and they are not shown to you, to other signers, or in any export.
7. Data leaving Nigeria
Some of the providers above operate outside Nigeria, so some of your data is processed abroad. Where that happens we rely on the transfer conditions in the Nigeria Data Protection Act: either that the destination provides adequate protection, or that we have contractual safeguards in place with that provider.
You can ask us which providers process your data and where, at privacy@usemacad.com.
8. How we protect it
- Everything travels over encrypted connections.
- Sensitive fields (bank account numbers, contact details, delivery addresses, verification names) are encrypted where they are stored, not merely behind a login.
- Where we need to look a value up without decrypting it, we use a one-way fingerprint rather than the value itself.
- Access by our staff is limited by role and is logged. Revealing a user's contact details or a delivery address is a specific, recorded action requiring a reason, not a side effect of opening a screen.
- Payment card details never reach us; they go directly to our payment provider.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your data and is likely to put you at risk, we will tell you and the NDPC as the law requires.
9. How long we keep it
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Your page and its signatures | Until you delete it, or 24 months after your account goes inactive |
| Payment and payout records | At least 6 years: required by tax and anti-money-laundering law, and kept even if you delete your account |
| Identity verification result and fingerprint | 6 years from your last transaction, for the same reason |
| Payer contact details | 18 months, then deleted: long enough to cover a dispute |
| Delivery addresses | 12 months after delivery |
| Support conversations | 24 months |
| Device and usage logs | 90 days |
Where we must keep a financial record after you have asked for deletion, we keep only that record and remove the rest.
10. Your rights
Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act you can ask us to:
- Show you the personal data we hold about you.
- Correct anything wrong or out of date.
- Delete your data, subject to records we are legally required to keep.
- Restrict or object to a use, particularly anything we do on the basis of legitimate interests.
- Give you a copy in a portable, machine-readable format.
- Withdraw consent where consent is what we relied on.
Email privacy@usemacad.com. We will respond within 30 days. We may need to confirm who you are first, which we will do without asking for anything more sensitive than we already hold.
Exercising these rights is free, and we will not treat you differently for it.
11. Age
Macad is for people aged 16 and over. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger, and pages may only be created by students at tertiary institutions.
If you believe someone under 16 has created a page, tell us at privacy@usemacad.com and we will remove it and delete the data.
13. Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when what we do changes. The date at the top shows the current version. If a change materially affects how we use your data, we will tell you directly rather than relying on you noticing the date.
14. Contact and complaints
Data questions: privacy@usemacad.com.
Everything else: support@usemacad.com.
If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission. You do not have to come to us first, though we would like the chance to put it right.
By creating an account, signing a Macad, or sending a gift, you accept this policy together with our Terms of Service, Gifts Policy and Community Guidelines.