Privacy Policy

This notice covers the Wicker app and usewicker.com. Wicker operates from Accra, Ghana. Contact support@usewicker.com about your personal data. Our first Ghana release is for adults aged 18 and over.

1. Account and age information

We use your email address, username, account identifiers, and sign-in information to create and secure your account. Passwords are stored as password hashes. If you choose Google Sign-In or a passkey, we process the identifiers and credentials needed to verify that sign-in. Profile photos, bios, and business details are optional information you add.

We collect your date of birth privately to determine whether you meet the 18+ requirement. We keep the birth date separately from public profile information, with an eligibility result and check record. It is not displayed on your profile. Contact support if the recorded date is incorrect.

Accounts that do not meet the age requirement are restricted from normal app access. Restricting access does not itself delete the account. An account holder or someone concerned about an under-18 account can contact support about correction or removal.

2. Content, conversations, and app activity

• Content you provide: photos, videos, captions, comments, reviews, places, events, products, services, and other listing details you submit.
• Social and discovery activity: follows, reactions, saved items, lists, queues, searches, place views, check-ins, and related activity records used to organize the app and make recommendations.
• Messages and calls: message text and shared files, conversation participants, delivery/read state, and call connection information. Microphone and camera access support voice/video calls and the content you choose to create.
• Service and security information: authentication/session identifiers, notification tokens, network and request details such as IP address, and operational/error logs needed to deliver, protect, and troubleshoot the service.

Posts, comments, reviews, listings, and content you share with an audience can be seen by that audience. Direct conversations are not a public feed, but their participants can read or save what you send. Notification previews may show message excerpts on a recipient’s device. Do not include information in a public post or shared message that you do not want its recipients to retain.

Shared links and optional previews

A link shared into Wicker opens a choice of what to do with it; it is not automatically posted, sent to a conversation, or fetched for a preview. Pending shares stay on your device until used or cleared. On iPhone, a draft saved by the share extension expires after 24 hours. Signing out clears pending shares.

Saved links are private bookmarks stored for your account on that device. Saving a bookmark does not upload the URL to Wicker or fetch the linked website. Bookmarks are cleared when you sign out; they are not a cloud backup. Posting a link, sending it in a conversation, or opening it externally is a separate action.

If you choose Add preview and confirm the explanation, Wicker receives that selected public URL and may request the page and a thumbnail from the website or its image host. Your surrounding draft or chat text is not part of the preview request. The destination can receive the requested URL and Wicker’s server request/network details; it is not sent your Wicker sign-in credentials. Links to some sites display only a source card without a metadata request.

Preview metadata can include the URL, title, description, source name and a small image. Wicker may keep public preview metadata in a bounded server memory cache for up to ten minutes. If you publish or send the preview, its snapshot is stored with the post or message and is visible to that content’s audience; it may remain even if the source page changes. Reading a stored preview does not automatically contact the source website. You can remove a preview before sharing and keep the URL as text. Opening a link contacts its destination through your device or browser, under that website’s privacy practices.

3. Location and selected contacts

With the relevant device permission, Wicker uses foreground location for nearby discovery, maps, check-ins, choosing delivery locations, placing listings/events, and recording a road report while you use that feature. A road recording can include a series of precise coordinates. Locations you select manually are also processed.

Location is not always private. A place, event, check-in, road report, or other location you choose to publish can reveal its coordinates to other users. A delivery address or pin is shared with the participants who need it for that delivery. Map and route services receive the map areas or coordinates requested from them.

Group contact selection: if you choose a phone contact for a group, Wicker receives the selected name and phone number. You can edit them before adding the person or recording an invitation. Existing group membership tools may resolve a supplied number against an account’s saved phone details or keep a pending invitation record. Those details are not proof of phone ownership. Wicker also uses existing chat contacts, followers, and following lists where those choices are shown. This contact-picker flow does not upload your entire address book. An invitation or share action you choose may pass its content to your selected messaging app.

People email lookup: you can choose one contact email with the system picker or enter one yourself. The selected contact name is not sent to the matching service. Picking a contact does not start a lookup: Wicker sends only the selected email after you confirm Find on Wicker. It is used for that request and is not saved as an uploaded contact or search-history entry. A match requires a current verified email, the account holder’s email-discovery opt-in, and the app’s eligibility and block checks. An unmatched, private or unavailable account is not identified. No invitation or follow is sent automatically. People does not match by phone number or use payment phone details.

Who can find you: email discovery is off by default. In Hub → Settings → Find me by email, verify your account email if needed, review the explanation, then choose whether to enable discovery. Mailgun sends the verification code to your own account email. Verifying alone does not opt you in. When enabled, Wicker stores the normalized account email as a matching identifier and records the preference/policy; a match shows your public profile, not your email. Turning discovery off removes that matching identifier and stops new email matches. Your username and profile link can still be used to reach your public profile.

The separate Address Book feature stores addresses you enter manually. Address text is encrypted on your device before upload. Wicker stores that ciphertext together with a readable label and your account identifier. The label is not encrypted, so avoid putting private address details in it. This encryption applies to Address Book entries.

Public place sources and community attribution

Place listings may include public names, addresses, coordinates and websites from licensed sources such as OpenStreetMap, alongside user-provided listings. Source and attribution labels distinguish imported information from owner-provided information; an import does not mean that a business has joined or endorsed Wicker. You can request a correction or removal through listing support.

Wicker-authored community posts are labelled Wicker Community. These labels identify editorial content rather than simulated independent users or invented reviews. The ordinary audience, reporting and account rules still apply to content you choose to publish.

4. Orders, groups, and private proofs

We retain historical order items, delivery details, recorded amounts, currency, provider references and status. Bookings and manual group records include membership, expenses, IOUs, contributions, confirmations, settlements recorded outside Wicker, and related notes. These records let the people involved understand the activity and its status; recording a settlement does not move money.

Relevant order or group records are visible to their participants as the feature requires. Buyer and seller proof images uploaded for an order are stored in private storage and accessed through an authenticated order route. Both the order’s buyer and seller can view those proofs; they are not published as public photo links.

The current release does not initiate payments or transfers, run hosted checkout, or request payment verification from a provider. Historical records remain available, and confirming delivery or receipt updates fulfilment records only. Any information previously received from Paystack or Orchard is historical; each provider’s own retention and privacy terms still apply to information it previously received.

Business owners can save a mobile-money number and selected network privately for their business. The destination remains pending verification. Saving it does not activate payments, authorize a charge, or confirm that the destination can receive funds through Wicker.

Checkout demonstration

The checkout demo reads the selected seller’s current catalog prices and quantities, your selected cart items or an existing service appointment, and the seller’s setup status. It uses a signed quote valid for five minutes and checks the current details again before showing a DEMO confirmation. The buyer sees only the seller’s mobile-money network and masked number, not the full saved destination.

If you continue the demo, Wicker receives the payer mobile-money number and network you enter to validate their format and return a masked confirmation. This does not verify wallet ownership. The demo does not save the entered payer number as a payment record or send it to Hubtel. It creates no charge, transfer, order, stock reservation or booking change. Its confirmation is not evidence of payment. Hubtel integration and API credentials are pending; no funds are held by Wicker in the demo.

Vendor plans, ownership review and activity reports

Plan records include a business identifier, pilot acceptance and its fixed start and end dates. Ownership requests include your stated relationship to a business and an evidence note. That evidence note is private to authorized reviewers. A review note explaining a decision can be shown to the business owner; ownership review is not government identity verification.

For authenticated storefront and product opens, and sponsored-promotion impressions and opens, Wicker records the account, business and relevant product or promotion identifiers, event type and time. Repeated events are deduplicated by account, item, event type and day. Owners receive aggregate counts and product totals, not viewer account identifiers or a customer list. Counts are activity reports, not unique-customer estimates, confirmed sales or forecasts. These event records are scheduled to expire after 90 days through database expiry cleanup.

Sponsored placements use the category and town or area a person explicitly selects. They do not target people using demographics, GPS, private conversations or browsing/search history. Promotion records include the submitted public-post snapshot, selected category and area, review status, placement dates and review notes. Changing or removing a public post can stop its promotion from serving.

5. Support and safety reports

If you contact support, we receive your sender details, subject, message, and any attachments you include. Support email is routed through Cloudflare to our forwarded support inbox hosted by Google Gmail, where the full original remains available to the support operator.

When support monitoring is connected, a signed integration also delivers a bounded plain-text preview and attachment details to an admin inbox. Attachment contents are not copied into that monitoring inbox, and oversized or unreadable messages are marked incomplete. Monitoring queue entries have a 24-hour retention window per queue; that window does not delete the original email in the forwarded inbox.

In-app reports include the reported content identifier, reason, and reporting account. Authorized administrators can review reports, support previews, account-cleanup status, and internal follow-up notes. Admin updates are recorded in an audit history. Monitoring does not send automatic replies or make autonomous moderation decisions.

In-app support requests contain your subject, message, submitting account, and your optional per-request assistance choice. For assisted review, both your current account permission and your separate choice for that particular report or request are required. Ordinary reports and support requests remain available without assistance.

6. Service providers and other recipients

We use the following services for the functions described here. The data sent depends on which features you use and which integrations are enabled:

• MongoDB Atlas: storage and retrieval of account, content, activity, transaction, and support records.
• Google Cloud: app hosting, uploaded media, private proof storage, and associated operational infrastructure.
• Google Sign-In and Firebase Cloud Messaging: optional Google authentication, notification tokens, notification content, and delivery metadata.
• Agora: voice/video call connections, including the media streams and channel/device/network information required to connect a call.
• Mailgun: account emails such as verification, recovery, and deletion-confirmation messages, including their destination address and content.
• Google Gmail: the forwarded support mailbox, including original email messages and attachments.
• Cloudflare: support email routing and, when connected, the bounded support monitoring and queue service described above.
• Vercel: hosting usewicker.com and processing website requests and delivery/security logs.
• OpenStreetMap and the OSRM route service: map tile requests and route coordinates for map and planning features.
• Linked websites and image hosts: public page/thumbnail requests after you explicitly add a preview, and requests from your device when you choose to open a link.
• TypeSafe AI, with separate permission: the optional decision assistance described below, through a direct TypeSafe AI connection when enabled.
• Google Gemini or OpenAI, with your permission: the optional AI assistance described below. AI assistance is off unless you explicitly enable it for your account.

Providers may process data on infrastructure outside Ghana. Providers process information under their applicable privacy notices and our service arrangements. We can also disclose information where a valid legal requirement applies or when necessary to investigate a security or safety issue.

Wicker does not sell personal data. The contextual sponsored placements described above do not provide vendors with viewer identities or use personal profiles for targeting. Public sharing you choose and the service-provider processing described above are separate from selling data.

7. Optional AI assistance

AI assistance is off by default. Open Hub → Settings → AI privacy to review the information involved and choose whether to enable it. If you enable it, the relevant feature can send the following information to Google Gemini or OpenAI:

• Comment analysis: up to 1,000 characters of a comment you write, to classify its sentiment.
• Recommendations: names of places you liked, your list and queue names, recent searches, and public place/product descriptions.
• AI search: the search query you enter.
• Queue planning: places in your queue, their categories and opening hours, and your chosen start date and time.
• Business schedule summaries: appointment counts and times. Customer names and identifiers are excluded from the AI summary request.
• Shelf scanning: the image you select and product names in your business inventory. Avoid including people or private documents in that image.

You can turn AI assistance off in the same setting. This stops future AI requests, including queued comment analysis. It cannot recall information already sent or cancel a request already in progress; the provider’s terms and privacy policy govern its retention. Ordinary search and non-AI recommendations remain available without enabling AI.

Search assistance privacy

Search and review assistance use a separate, optional permission in Search assistance privacy. Existing Google Gemini or OpenAI permission does not enable it. When available and chosen, Wicker sends a bounded request directly to TypeSafe AI. Search uses only the query you explicitly submit; place suggestions use your selected preferences and a small set of public place details. Search history and private conversations are not included. Wicker checks location and budget constraints locally; unknown prices remain unknown.

Administrators may request category or possible-duplicate suggestions for licensed public place records. A person must explicitly approve a category change. Duplicate suggestions do not merge places or transfer ownership, reviews, or commerce.

For a report or in-app support request, TypeSafe AI receives only the reason or subject and message you chose to share for that submission. An administrator also needs their own current assistance permission to request a suggestion. Contact, payment, and identity details are removed where detectable; this is not a guarantee of complete anonymisation. Do not include passwords, payment credentials, identity documents, or another person’s private information. The reported conversation or other target content, support email previews, attachments, internal notes, and account-cleanup records are not sent.

Assisted review returns suggested categories and review priorities. A human must accept them before they become internal inbox labels. They do not send replies, ban accounts, hide content, process refunds, or change account cleanup. Unavailable or declined assistance leaves ordinary manual review available.

Turning this assistance off stops future requests, including future assistance for reports or requests you previously opted into. It cannot recall information already sent or cancel a request already in progress. TypeSafe AI handles that information under its privacy policy and applicable terms. Wicker does not promise zero data retention by this provider.

8. Your choices and security

You can change optional profile information, choose what to post or share, use the app’s content/reporting controls, and change camera, microphone, location, or notification permissions in your device settings. Declining a permission limits the feature that needs it; it does not remove information you already submitted.

Production connections use HTTPS. Account and private-proof routes require authentication and access checks, and support administration requires an active admin role. These controls reduce unauthorized access; they are not a promise that no security incident can occur. Do not send passwords or login/recovery codes to support.

9. Retention and account deletion

We retain account information and content to provide the features you use. Operational, security, and support records are kept as needed for their purpose, resolving issues, and applicable legal requirements. Retention can differ by record and provider; there is no single retention period covering every log, backup, and support email. Ask support about particular data if you need more detail.

Open Hub’s settings menu and choose Delete account. You can also request deletion without signing in by emailing support@usewicker.com. We verify ownership before acting. The account deletion page explains the confirmation and status steps.

Once an in-app deletion starts, account access is revoked and cleanup processes the account’s personal data and uploads that can be reliably attributed to it. Cleanup retries when a required service is unavailable. Some completed shared records remain with account references anonymized for the other participants.

Active removal is different from expiry of storage recovery copies. Storage for private order proofs currently has a seven-day recovery window, so recoverable object copies can remain after active cleanup. This does not keep the account open. Older uploads without reliable account ownership records may need an ownership review before removal. Contact support about specific files or retained records.

Original support emails in the forwarded mailbox are reviewed separately when you request their deletion; removing an app account does not automatically erase that mailbox copy. We can explain any record-specific retention that applies to your request.

10. Data requests and contact

You can ask what personal data we hold about you, request a correction, or request deletion where applicable. Email support@usewicker.com with the subject “Data request”. We may ask you to verify identity before discussing account-specific information. You can also contact Ghana’s Data Protection Commission about your data rights or a complaint.

Privacy contact: support@usewicker.com, +233 24 961 7491. Postal contact: 20 Woody Street, Teshie Rasta Road, Accra, Ghana.

We will publish policy updates on this page and change the date shown above. A material change to processing may also require notice or a choice in the app.