Privacy Policy

AlertGrid is a community safety application for South African communities — including homes, farms, apartments, and offices. It enables registered members to send and receive emergency alerts for incidents including fire, criminal activity, medical emergencies, and general danger, and to coordinate through private community groups and group chat.

For the purposes of POPIA, AlertGrid acts as the Responsible Party for personal information collected through the application.

We collect only the information necessary to operate the AlertGrid safety network. We do not collect data for advertising or marketing purposes.

Information You Provide Directly

Information Collected Automatically

• Device type and operating system (for app compatibility)
• Session timestamps (for security audit logs)
• Alert history associated with your account (for community safety records)

Your personal information is used exclusively for the following purposes:

1. Creating and maintaining your AlertGrid account
2. Delivering emergency alerts to members within your chosen radius
3. Enabling navigation to members in distress during active emergencies
4. Maintaining the security and integrity of the community network
5. Preventing duplicate or fraudulent registrations
6. Complying with applicable South African law

We do not use your information for advertising, profiling, data brokering, or any commercial purpose unrelated to community safety.

Your GPS location is one of the most sensitive pieces of information we hold. We treat it with the highest level of protection.

Under Normal Circumstances

During an Active Emergency Alert

When you deliberately trigger an emergency alert, your location is temporarily disclosed to registered AlertGrid members within your chosen alert radius only, for the duration of the active alert. You select this radius — 1, 5, or 10 kilometres — during registration, and can change it at any time in your account settings. The same radius determines which alerts from others you receive. This is the core purpose of the application and you explicitly consent to this disclosure at the time you activate the alert.

• Location is visible only to registered, verified members within your chosen radius (1–10 km)
• Location visibility ends when you resolve the alert or after one hour, whichever comes first
• Historical alert records retain your name and general area but do not expose precise coordinates to other users

Device Location Permission

AlertGrid may request access to your device's GPS to help you pin your property location during registration, and to update it later if you move. This is optional — you may also place your pin manually on the map. You may revoke this permission at any time in your device settings.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We share your information only in the following limited circumstances:

With Other AlertGrid Members

Your first name and location are disclosed to nearby members only during an active emergency alert you have triggered. See Section 4.

Within Communities You Join

If you create or join a community, your name and any messages you send in that community's group chat are visible to the other members of that community. Community membership is voluntary, and you may leave a community at any time. Group chat messages are automatically cleared at the start of each month.

With Your Emergency Contacts

You add an emergency contact by their cellphone number. To protect privacy, you are not shown the person's name or email before they accept, and an unregistered number gives the same result as a registered one — so the feature cannot be used to find out who owns a number. Once they accept, you and your contact can see each other's current name and email, and you are notified of each other's alerts regardless of distance. This connection is mutual — both parties must agree to it — and either party may remove it at any time.

Blocking Other Members

You can block any member from an incoming alert, the group chat, or a community member list. Blocking is one-directional and private — the blocked person is not told. While blocked, their chat messages are hidden from you, they cannot send you contact requests, any existing emergency-contact link between you is removed, and you will not receive their emergency alerts. You can view and reverse your blocks at any time under Account → Blocked Users.

With Service Providers

We use the following third-party services to operate AlertGrid. Each is contractually bound to protect your data:

Legal Requirements

We may disclose your information if required to do so by South African law, court order, or to protect the safety of persons in an emergency.

Your data is stored in a PostgreSQL database managed by Supabase and hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) — one of the world's most secure and widely-trusted cloud platforms. The following protections are in place:

• All data is encrypted at rest using AES-256 encryption, managed at the AWS infrastructure layer
• All data is transmitted over HTTPS/TLS encrypted connections
• Row-Level Security (RLS) policies ensure you can only access your own profile data
• Group-chat messages are automatically profanity-filtered before they are stored or shown to other members
• Authentication tokens expire and are automatically refreshed
• Passwords are never stored in plain text — they are hashed using industry-standard algorithms
• Databases are backed up daily on encrypted AWS infrastructure

Data Retention

We retain your data for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account through the app, your profile and personal data are removed immediately from our active database. Alert history records may be retained in anonymised form (without personal identifying details) for community safety analysis.

Data Breach Notification

In the event of a data breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you by email within 72 hours of becoming aware of the breach, as required by POPIA.

AlertGrid integrates with the following third-party services. When you interact with these services, their own privacy policies apply:

• Google Maps: Used to display satellite maps. Google Privacy Policy
• Google OAuth: Optional sign-in method. Google Privacy Policy
• Supabase: Database and authentication, hosted on AWS. Supabase Privacy Policy
• Amazon Web Services (AWS): Cloud infrastructure hosting the database. AWS Privacy Notice
• Navigation Apps: When you tap Navigate (Google Maps, Waze, Apple Maps, OsmAnd), you leave AlertGrid and those apps' policies apply

The Protection of Personal Information Act gives you the following rights regarding your personal information held by AlertGrid:

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at info@alertgrid.co.za. We will respond within 30 days.

AlertGrid is intended for users who are at least 18 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from persons under the age of 18. If we become aware that we have collected information from a person under 18, we will delete it promptly.

If you believe a minor has registered an account, please contact us immediately at info@alertgrid.co.za and we will promptly delete the account and associated data.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time as the app evolves or as legal requirements change. When we make material changes we will:

• Update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page
• Send a notification to your registered email address
• Display a notice within the AlertGrid app

Continued use of AlertGrid after changes are posted constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy. If you do not agree with the changes, you may delete your account at any time.