Privacy Policy

Afrobabel Foundation (“Afrobabel”, “we”, “us”) is a non-profit organisation registered in Zambia (PACCRA). We operate the Afrobabel language data platform at afrobabel.org.

Contact: privacy@afrobabel.org

When you create an account we collect:

• Email address (via Clerk authentication)
• Display name
• Location (country and region — optional)
• Languages spoken and self-reported fluency levels

When you submit an entry we collect:

• The text of your submission
• Metadata: language, category, word count, attribution name
• The version of the consent agreement you accepted
• Timestamps of creation and submission

We use your data to:

• Operate the competition platform
• Send submission confirmation emails
• Build the Afrobabel open training corpus (submissions you consent to)
• Generate anonymised aggregate statistics about the corpus

We do not sell your data, use it for advertising, or share it with third parties except as described in Section 4.

• Clerk — authentication provider. Your email and sign-in data are processed by Clerk in accordance with their privacy policy.
• Railway — database and API hosting. Data is stored on Railway's infrastructure in the EU (Frankfurt).
• Resend — transactional email. We share your email address with Resend only to deliver submission confirmation emails.
• Hugging Face — the public training corpus is published on Hugging Face Datasets. Published records include your submission text, attribution name, language metadata, and consent version. They do not include your email address or account identifier.

When you submit an entry and accept the contributor consent agreement, you grant Afrobabel a perpetual, royalty-free licence to include your submission in the open training corpus under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Your attribution name (not your email or account ID) is included in every published corpus record. You can choose a pen name as your attribution name.

Once a submission has been published in the corpus, we cannot guarantee removal from all downstream copies — but we can remove it from the canonical Afrobabel dataset and will do so on request. Contact privacy@afrobabel.org.

You have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you
• Correct inaccurate data
• Request deletion of your account and unpublished submissions
• Object to processing
• Data portability

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@afrobabel.org. We will respond within 30 days.

We retain your account data for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, we delete your personal data within 30 days. Submissions you have consented to include in the corpus are retained as part of the corpus (see Section 5).

We use only session cookies necessary for authentication (set by Clerk). We do not use tracking cookies or third-party analytics.

We will notify registered users by email before making material changes to this policy. The latest version is always available at afrobabel.org/privacy.