Privacy
Bulawayo Pulse is a free civic guide, not an ads business. This page says exactly what we collect, why, and who it's shared with, in plain language, with nothing hidden in legal filler.
Last reviewed 15 July 2026.
No accounts, no profiles
There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to log into. We don't build a profile of you, and we don't track you across other sites.
One cookie, and it's yours
The only cookie we set is the suburb you pick on My Bulawayo, so that page can load with your suburb already selected. It holds a suburb name, nothing more.
Named processors, never ad networks
A short list of services help us run the site (hosting, email, one AI answer engine). None of them are ad or marketing platforms, and we don't sell or rent data to anyone.
Ask, and it's gone
Anything you've given us, an email subscription, a submission, a message, can be deleted on request. Email us and we'll action it.
What we collect, and why
Browsing the site. Reading notices, places, guides, water and electricity status, jobs, events, no personal information is collected at all. Page loads are counted in aggregate by Vercel Web Analytics, which doesn't use cookies and can't identify you.
Notice alerts for your suburb.You give us an email and a suburb. We send one confirmation email (double opt-in, so nobody can subscribe an address that isn't theirs) and, after that, a digest when a council notice affects your suburb. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe. We also keep a same-day, salted hash of the submitting IP address purely to stop abuse of the sign-up form, it can't be reversed back into an IP address and is never used to identify anyone.
My Bulawayo. Choosing a suburb on this page sets one cookie (byo-my-suburb) holding just the suburb name, so the page can load pre-filtered. No account, no email, and it's deleted the moment you clear it in the page's own control.
Feedback, listings, edits and reports. If you tell us what's missing, add a place, suggest an edit, or flag something wrong, we store what you wrote and, only if you chose to leave one, a way to contact you back. That contact detail is never shown publicly, it exists only so a moderator can follow up if your submission needs clarifying. As with sign-ups, we keep a same-day salted IP hash to catch spam, never to identify you.
Ask Byo.The question you type is sent to Groq, the AI provider that generates the answer, so it can be matched against our own sourced content. We don't attach your IP, location or any identifier to the question, and we cache common questions so most are answered without a fresh AI call at all.
Theme and language.Light/dark mode and your chosen language are stored in your browser's local storage, not sent to us at all, not even as a cookie.
Who we share it with
We don't sell, rent or trade data, and there is no advertising pixel or ad network on this site. A short list of processors run the infrastructure behind the scenes, each bound to only the task described:
- Vercel, hosting, and cookieless page analytics.
- Neon, the database that stores subscriptions, submissions and feedback described above.
- Resend, delivers our transactional email (confirmations, digests, unsubscribes), nothing promotional.
- Groq, generates Ask Byo's answers from the question text only, as described above.
We may disclose information if genuinely required by Zimbabwean law, but we've never received such a request and there's very little to hand over even if we did.
How long we keep it
Notice-alert subscriptions are kept until you unsubscribe. Feedback, listing submissions, edit suggestions and reports are kept while they're open or useful for improving the directory, then archived. Abuse-prevention IP hashes are salted daily and are not linked to anything you submitted the day after.
Your rights
Ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, and we will. There's no account to manage this from because there are no accounts; it's handled by emailing us directly.
Changes to this policy
If what we collect changes, for example a new form field or a new processor, this page is updated and the "last reviewed" date above moves. We don't backdate or quietly widen what we collect.
Questions, or a request
Email hello@byopulse.com for anything on this page, including access, correction or deletion requests.