Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how Hakanow collects, uses, shares, and protects personal data when you use the Platform as a hacker, organizer, judge, or other participant (e.g. volunteer, mentor, or sponsor contact) in a hackathon. It applies wherever you access Hakanow, in any market we serve.

• Account data — name, email, password (stored hashed, never in plain text), and profile details you add.
• Hackathon activity — registrations, team memberships, project submissions, upvotes, judge scores and comments, and post-event feedback.
• Organizer & organization data — organization profiles, member roles, hackathon configuration, sponsor and partner details, and volunteer/mentor applications submitted to your events.
• Prize & payment preference data— a winner's chosen payout method and destination details, submitted so the organizer can pay them.
• Technical data — IP address, device/browser information, and a locale cookie that remembers your preferred language across visits.

We use personal data to:

• Operate core features — accounts, hackathon registration, teams, submissions, judging, and prize tracking.
• Send transactional notifications (e.g. registration confirmations, judging assignments, prize status updates, announcements from an organizer running an event you're part of).
• Remember your language preference and other in-product settings.
• Maintain security — detecting abuse, fraud, and unauthorized access.
• Improve the Platform, including understanding aggregate usage patterns.
• Comply with legal obligations.

We do not sell personal data.

• Organizers see the registration, team, and submission data of hackers in their own hackathon, and the results of any judging on that event, so they can run it.
• Judgessee the submissions assigned to them for the hackathon they were invited to judge — not participants' account or contact details beyond what a submission includes.
• Other participants see what a hackathon makes public by design — team rosters, public submissions, and announced results.
• Service providers who help us run the Platform (hosting, email delivery, file storage) under confidentiality obligations, and only to the extent needed to provide their service.
• Legal & safety — where required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Hakanow, our users, or the public.

Prize payment details are encrypted at the application layer (AES-256-GCM) before storage and are decrypted only on the specific, organizer-facing screen used to pay a winner. They are never included in list views, API responses, or shared with anyone other than the organizer paying that prize.

We use a small number of cookies that are necessary for the Platform to function — keeping you signed in and remembering your chosen display language. We do not use third-party advertising cookies.

We keep account and hackathon activity data for as long as your account is active, and for a reasonable period afterward to resolve disputes, meet legal or accounting obligations, and maintain the historical record of a hackathon's results. You can request deletion as described below; some data may be retained where law requires it or where it's part of a hackathon's settled public results.

Depending on where you live — under laws such as the GDPR, Ghana's Data Protection Act, Kenya's Data Protection Act, Nigeria's Data Protection Act, or similar laws elsewhere — you may have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Correct inaccurate data (most account data is editable directly from your profile).
• Request deletion of your account and associated personal data, subject to the retention needs above.
• Object to or restrict certain processing.
• Withdraw consent where processing is based on consent.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at privacy@hakanow.com.

We apply technical and organizational safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the data involved, including password hashing, encryption of prize payment details at rest, and role-based access so that judges, organizers, and hackers only see what their role requires. No system is perfectly secure, and we encourage you to use a strong, unique password and keep your login credentials confidential.

Hakanow serves users across multiple African markets and may process or store data in a country other than the one you're in. Where we do, we take steps to ensure it receives a comparable level of protection to what this Policy describes.

Hakanow is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will take appropriate action.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated through the Platform. The "last updated" date above reflects the most recent revision.

Questions or requests about this Policy can be sent to privacy@hakanow.com.