Privacy

Privacy notice

What we hold about you, why, for how long, and how to make us change or delete it.

NOESIS Reading Society (“the society”, “we”) is based in Nairobi, Kenya. We handle personal data in line with the Data Protection Act, 2019 and its regulations. This notice covers this website and the society’s membership, events and Pages of Hope work.

What we collect

Membership: your name, email, phone number, city, optional occupation, reading interests, preferred format and why you joined.
Payments: the M-Pesa phone number, amount, M-Pesa receipt number and outcome. We never see your M-Pesa PIN.
Your reading life on the site: books on your shelf and your progress, reflections, reviews, discussion posts, poll votes and questions.
Events: registrations, ticket type, attendance check-in.
Pages of Hope: volunteer details including your consent to a background check, pledges and donations.
The society’s letter: your email address and whether you confirmed it.
Security: a one-way hash of your network address for rate limiting. We do not store raw IP addresses and use no advertising trackers.

Why, and on what basis

To run your membership and the services you sign up for — performance of our agreement with you.
To keep payment and donation records — legal obligation, including tax record-keeping.
To send the society’s letter — your consent, which you can withdraw with one click in any letter.
To keep children safe in Pages of Hope work — legitimate interest and legal duty, with your explicit consent to checks.

Children

Membership is for adults. We do not collect personal data from children through this site. Photographs from Pages of Hope visits are published only where a parent, guardian or the responsible institution has given written consent, and images are re-encoded on upload to strip location data.

Who processes data for us

Supabase (database, sign-in and file storage), Vercel (website hosting), Resend (email delivery) and Safaricom (M-Pesa payments). Some of these providers store data outside Kenya; we use them under contracts that require appropriate safeguards. We do not sell or rent personal data.

How long we keep it

Membership data is kept while you are a member and deleted or anonymised when you ask us to close your membership, except payment records, which we keep for as long as the law requires. Discussion posts may be kept in anonymised form so that conversations remain readable.

Your rights

You may ask to see the data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, object to its use, or receive a copy in a portable format. You can update most details yourself under Account → Profile. For anything else, write to the society at the contact address published on this site. If you are not satisfied with our answer you may complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.

Changes

We will post any change to this notice here and tell members by email when it matters.