Privacy policy

The rules we follow

We follow Law No. 2024/017 of 23 December 2024 on the protection of personal data in Cameroon. It gives you rights over your data: to be informed, to see it, to correct it, to have it erased, to limit its use and to object to it. It also asks us to keep data confidential and to ask the data protection authority for permission before data leaves Cameroon.

We also respect Law No. 2010/012 of 21 December 2010 on cybersecurity and cybercrime, and we take the African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection (Malabo, 2014) as our guide for fair processing.

Our users live in many African countries. When the law of the country where you live gives you more protection (for example in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire), we apply the rule that protects you most.

What we collect, and why

We collect only what each part of the service needs. Here it is, part by part.

• Your account: first name, last name, email address, language, your organisation if you give it, and your phone number if you give it. Your password is stored only as a one way scrambled value that nobody can read back. We send you codes by email to confirm your address and to sign in. Purpose: to run your account.
• Learning and certification: your progress, quiz answers, the designs you save, your exam answers and the mission study you make in the exam. Dr Ifriky Tadadjeu grades the exam. You read the grade and the feedback in your own space. Nobody else can read your studies except the administrators. If you pass, a certificate with a number is made, and anyone who has the number can check on our website your name, the date and that the certificate is valid. That is the purpose of a certificate.
• Payments: when you pay by card or PayPal, PayPal handles your card, and NMD never sees your card number. When you pay by mobile money, our payment provider PawaPay receives your phone number, your operator and the amount. We keep a record of each payment, the amount, the date and the status, to give you a receipt and to keep our accounts as the law asks.
• Contact and orders: the name, email and message you write on the contact page. For a kit order: your name, email, phone, institution, country and the delivery details we agree with you.
• Space Clubs: the club, its president and its members. The names of the members of a club are visible to the other members and to the president of that club. The official documents that a club sends us are kept in a private place that only the persons in charge can open.
• Community: what you write in a discussion room is visible to the people who are allowed in that room.
• Video meetings and webinars: sound and video go through our own video server. Everybody in a call is told when it is transcribed. A webinar can be recorded: people who were absent watch the recording until 48 hours after the end, then the file is erased.
• Signing documents: when you approve and sign an agreement on the platform, we record your name, your email address, the time, the address of your internet connection (IP address) and your device, and the one time code that proved your email. We keep them as the evidence of the signature.
• Security: we use the address of your internet connection to limit the number of attempts to sign in or to send a form, and to protect the site from abuse. We do not use it for advertising.

Candidates and staff

When you apply for a job or a mission, we keep your profile, your CV and the documents you give us (for example an identity document or your taxpayer number certificate), the notes of the interviews, and the offer and the contract. A call or an interview can be transcribed. You are told before, and a candidate does not read the transcript. We use a tool to read the taxpayer number on the certificate, and you see what was read and confirm it. This data is opened only by people who work on hiring.

People who are not users: business contacts and prospects

NMD keeps a register of the people it works with or may work with: universities, companies, partners, and persons who wrote to us. It holds the name, the professional details, and the history of our exchanges by email, WhatsApp, call and meeting. A member of NMD staff can link their own WhatsApp account; only the conversations that the staff member chooses to follow are read by the platform. A staff member can add a professional profile that is public (for example a LinkedIn address), by pasting it.

When we found a person on public professional information and we never contacted them, their data is erased after a delay that we set (60 days at present). Group emails carry a link to stop receiving them, and it works at once.

If you are in this register and you want to see your data, correct it or have it erased, write to us. We answer even if you never had an account.

Artificial intelligence

Some texts are sent to the artificial intelligence service of Anthropic PBC (United States) to help us: the analysis of exam papers, the transcript of a meeting, the history of a conversation with a business contact to prepare a message, the text of a professional profile that a staff member pastes, and the reading of a taxpayer number certificate. These texts are used to answer us and nothing else.

A person decides. The grade of an exam is decided by Dr Ifriky Tadadjeu, and the analysis is a suggestion that you also read. An assistant never sends a message by itself: a member of staff reads, changes and sends it. We tell the assistant that the text it reads is data to analyse, not instructions to follow.

Who receives your data

We do not sell your data and we do not give it to advertisers. These are the only companies that process it for us:

• The hosting company that rents us the server where the platform and the database run.
• Our email provider, which sends and receives our emails.
• PayPal and PawaPay, for the payments.
• Anthropic PBC, for the artificial intelligence described above.
• Meta (WhatsApp), when a member of staff talks to you on WhatsApp.

Data that leaves Cameroon

Some of these companies work outside Cameroon, for example Anthropic and PayPal. We send them only what each task needs. Cameroonian law asks for the permission of the data protection authority for a transfer abroad. We name here the companies that receive data abroad, and we update this page when the authority publishes its procedures.

How long we keep your data

• The detail of the measurement of the site: 90 days at present, then erased.
• The data of a business contact never contacted: 60 days at present, then erased.
• The recording of a webinar: until 48 hours after its end.
• Your account and your learning: as long as your account exists. When you ask us to close it, we erase your data, except what the law obliges us to keep, such as the records of payments for our accounts, the agreements that you signed and the record of a certificate that we issued.
• Everything else: no longer than the purpose for which we collected it.

How we protect it

• Access is limited by role. Staff, administrators and the persons who certify have different rights, and the limits are checked on the server.
• Documents and contracts are kept in a private place that has no public address. They are opened only through the platform, after a check of who asks.
• Passwords are stored scrambled. Sign in codes are used once and expire. Repeated wrong attempts are blocked for a while.
• Each agreement that is negotiated on the platform keeps all its versions, chained one to the next, so that a change after the signature can be seen.
• If a breach of data happens that puts you at risk, we tell the authority and the persons concerned as the law asks.

Your rights

You can ask us, at any time and free of charge:

• to tell you what data we hold about you, why, and who receives it;
• to correct or update data that is wrong or incomplete;
• to erase your data;
• to limit the use of your data while a doubt is cleared;
• to stop a use of your data that you object to, for example group emails or the measurement of the site;
• to withdraw a consent that you gave, which does not undo what was done before;
• to give you your data in a form that you can reuse.

How to use your rights

Write to us from the contact page, from the email address of your account when you have one, and say what you ask. We may ask for a proof of who you are, so that nobody else can obtain your data. We answer as soon as we can, and always within the time that the law gives us. Some data we must keep by law (see above), and we will explain it if it is the case.

If you think that we did not respect your rights, you can complain to the Personal Data Protection Authority created by Law No. 2024/017, once it is in operation, or to the data protection authority of the country where you live.

Children

The platform is made for students and professionals. It is not designed for children. If you think that a child gave us data, write to us and we erase it.

Content that other companies serve

Some pages load content straight from the servers of other companies, which then see the address of your internet connection: the maps of the Earth observation and space pages (OpenStreetMap and NASA), the payment buttons (PayPal, which also sets its own cookies), and a font from Google Fonts on the certificate page and on the mission document export.

Cookies and similar storage

• Necessary: the session that keeps you signed in, your choice of language (nmd_lang) and your choices about the notice of measurement (nmd_a, nmd_a_notice). Without them the site cannot work properly.
• Measurement: a random code of your browser (nmd_vid) and a code of the visit (nmd_sid, nmd_sid_at), stored on your device. They are used only if you did not say no, and they are removed when you say no.
• We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not add trackers of other companies to the site.

Changes to this page

When our practices change, we change this page and its date. If the change is important for you, we tell you on the site or by email.

How we measure this site

We look at how visitors use the site so that we can make it clearer and easier. This is exactly what is measured, what is never seen, and how to say no.

What is measured

• The pages that you open, in which order, and for how long.
• Where you click, which buttons and links you hover, and how far you scroll.
• Which field of a form you reach, and where you stop. Only the name of the field.
• The type of device, the browser, the size of the screen and the language.
• How fast the page was, and whether an error happened.
• Whether a visit ended with a registration or a payment, so that we can see what helps people to join.

What is never seen

• What you type: no password, no name, no email, no number, no message.
• Your address on the internet (IP address). It is not stored by the measurement.
• What you do inside the staff area. Members of staff are not measured at all.
• Your identity. A random code in your browser links the pages of one visit. It is not your name and it is not shared with anybody.

What happens to it

It stays on our own server. It is read by the NMD administrators, as totals and as maps of the pages. It is not sold and not given to advertisers or to other companies. The detail of a visit is erased after 90 days.

Your choice

You can say no at any time. We also respect the "Do Not Track" and "Global Privacy Control" signals of your browser.

Contact

For any question about your data, write to us from the contact page, or at ifriky@nanosatellitemissions.com. Contact page