Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2nd September, 2025

This Privacy Policy outlines how Lanfrica Labs ("Lanfrica," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, and protects your personal information when you interact with our platform and services. Lanfrica is dedicated to mapping the landscape of AI in Africa through the lens of tools, datasets, models, and applications, in order to accelerate innovation and enable a holistic understanding of the continent's AI representation, gaps, and risks. We are committed to transparency and ensuring the privacy and security of your data.

Information We Collect

Lanfrica collects various types of information to provide and improve our services.

Information You Provide Directly:

When you engage with our platform, you may provide us with personal information:

When you sign up or create an account with us: We collect your name and email address. This information is essential for creating and managing your user account, enabling your access to platform features, and facilitating communication regarding your account and our services. Users who create an account on the Lanfrica platform will need to provide their name and email address. They will also have the option to add links to their social media or other professional pages (e.g., ORCID, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, GitHub) to their profile if they choose to do so.
For participants registering for our events (workshops, webinars, hackathons, etc): We will collect their name, email address, and affiliation. We may also request a phone number to facilitate faster communication when necessary for event logistics.
For Lanfrica employees: All Lanfrica employees will be required to provide their name and basic contact information for employment and communication purposes.

Information Collected When You Link a Record on Lanfrica:

Lanfrica is a discovery platform that curates and links to existing resources rather than hosting them directly. When you contribute by linking a record on Lanfrica (e.g., a dataset, research paper, tool, or book), we may collect information related to that record and your contribution. While the content of the linked record itself is publicly accessible through its source, we may collect:

Metadata associated with the linked record: This includes information you provide during the linking process, such as the title, description, categories, and tags of the resource. This metadata helps us organize and make the resource discoverable on our platform. During the harvesting stage, the metadata we collect will sometimes include contributor or owner details that are publicly listed with the resource. This is typically limited to the author's/creator's name and their institutional affiliation.
Your contributor identity: If you choose to link a record while logged into your account, your contribution will be associated with your user profile (which includes your name and email). This is done to acknowledge contributions and foster a community-driven ecosystem.

Information Collected Automatically (Cookies):

We use "cookies" and similar tracking technologies to enhance your experience on our platform, analyze usage patterns, and improve our services. Cookies are small data files stored on your device that allow us to remember your preferences, track your navigation, and understand how you interact with our website.

Purpose of Cookies:
- Essential Cookies: These are necessary for the website to function correctly, enabling core functionalities like secure login and navigation.
- Analytical/Performance Cookies: These cookies help us understand how visitors interact with our website by collecting information about the number of visitors, which pages are most popular, and how users move around the site. This helps us improve the user experience and the platform's performance.
- Functionality Cookies: These cookies allow us to remember choices you make (such as your username or language preferences) and provide enhanced, more personalized features.

You have the option to accept or refuse cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser settings to decline cookies if you prefer. However, this may prevent you from fully utilizing the website.

How We Use Your Information

Lanfrica uses the collected information for the following purposes:

To provide and maintain our services: Including managing your account, providing access to the platform, and facilitating the discovery of African AI resources.
To improve and personalize your experience: Understanding how you use our platform allows us to optimize its functionality, content, and user interface.
To facilitate community contributions: By associating linked records with contributor identities, we foster a collaborative environment and recognize valuable contributions to the African AI landscape.
For communication: To send you important updates, announcements, and information related to your account or our services.
For research and analysis: To understand usage trends, identify popular resources, and inform our strategic initiatives in mapping Africa's AI landscape.
To ensure security and prevent fraudulent activity: We use your data to maintain the security of our platform and protect against unauthorized access or misuse.

Sharing Your Information

Lanfrica does not sell or rent your personal information to third parties. We may share your information in the following limited circumstances:

With your consent: We may share your information if you provide explicit consent to do so.
For legal compliance: We may disclose your information when required by law, court order, or other governmental authority, or when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, property, or safety, or the rights, property, or safety of others.
With service providers: We may engage third-party service providers to assist us in operating our platform and providing our services (e.g., cloud hosting, analytics). These providers are contractually obligated to protect your information and use it only for the purposes for which we disclose it to them.
For aggregated and anonymized data: We may share aggregated or anonymized data that does not identify you personally for research, analytical, or statistical purposes.

Data Security

Lanfrica is committed to protecting your personal information. We implement a variety of security measures, including technical and organizational safeguards, to protect against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction of your data. These measures include, but are not limited to, encryption, access controls, and regular security assessments.

All data, including user information and harvested metadata, will be stored in our MongoDB database, which is hosted on a secure, cloud-based server. Access to the database is strictly limited to authorized personnel through password-protected credentials. We implement regular automated backups to prevent data loss. Regarding encryption, we employ industry-standard encryption to protect data both in transit and at rest. MongoDB uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to encrypt network traffic between clients and the server, as well as between different MongoDB processes and nodes. This ensures data is protected while in motion. Sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) stored in our database, such as user passwords, is hashed and salted, ensuring it is unreadable even in the event of a data breach. Only authorized Lanfrica administrators have access to the backend systems.

Data Retention

We retain your personal information only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. When your information is no longer needed, we will securely delete or anonymize it.

Personally identifiable information associated with a user's account (such as name and email) and their contributions (links they have made) will be retained for as long as the user maintains an active account on the Lanfrica platform. If a user chooses to delete their account, we will permanently remove all of their personally identifiable data from our systems within a 90-day period. Aggregated and fully anonymized data, such as platform usage statistics (e.g., "1,000 searches were made for healthcare datasets in Q3", "there were 200 hours of Swahili datasets in 2025", etc), is not personally identifiable. This data will be retained indefinitely for historical analysis and for tracking the long-term growth and impact of the African AI ecosystem.

Your Rights

You have certain rights regarding your personal information:

Right to Access: You have the right to request access to the personal information we hold about you.
Right to Rectification: You have the right to request that we correct any inaccurate or incomplete personal information we hold about you.
Right to Erasure: You have the right to request the deletion of your personal information, subject to certain legal obligations.
Right to Object: You have the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
Right to Data Portability: You have the right to receive your personal information in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the contact information provided below.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or for other operational, legal, or regulatory reasons. We will notify you of any significant changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the "Last Updated" date.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about these Terms, please contact us at [email protected] or physically at the following address: 6666, St-Urbain, #200 Montreal, Quebec, H2S 3H1, Canada.