Privacy Policy

HIVE Housing Technologies is the data controller for personal data processed on hivenigeria.com. We process personal data in line with the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 (NDPA).

Contact our privacy team at privacy@hivenigeria.com.

• Account: email address, password (stored hashed, never in readable form), sign-in codes, and session records.
• Profile: name, photo, university, gender, phone number, bio, preferred area, budget range, and move-in date.
• Lifestyle answers: tidiness, sleep schedule, study habits, and the lifestyle tags you pick — smoking, pets, diet, and similar. These exist to rank matches.
• Verification: a student ID or other document, where we ask for one.
• Listings: for agents, property details, photographs, video, and payout details.
• Activity: connection requests, messages you send through HIVE, saved listings, blocks, and reports.
• Payments: transaction records. Card details are handled by Paystack and never reach our servers.
• Technical: IP address, device and browser information, and logs. Used for security, rate limiting, and diagnosing faults.

• To run the service — creating your account, showing matches, carrying messages, taking payments. Basis: performance of our contract with you.
• To keep people safe — verification, fraud checks, captcha, rate limits, reviewing reports, enforcing blocks. Basis: legitimate interest in a safe platform, and legal obligation.
• To improve matching — understanding which matches work. Basis: legitimate interest.
• To contact you — account emails, security alerts, and notices about matches or messages. Basis: contract. Marketing email, if we ever send it, is consent-based and you can opt out.
• To meet legal duties — accounting, tax, and lawful requests. Basis: legal obligation.

• Students you match with see your name, photo, university, area, budget range, move-in date, bio, and lifestyle answers.
• Your email address and phone number are not shown in matching. They become available only once a connection is accepted by both sides.
• Agents see your name and enquiry details when you contact them about a listing.
• Nobody sees your password, your verification document, your payment records, who you have blocked, or that you have reported them.

Anything you type into a message or a bio can be read, screenshotted, and kept by the person you sent it to. Treat it as public.

We do not sell personal data. We share it with service providers who process it on our instructions:

• Paystack — payments.
• Cloudinary — hosting photographs and video.
• Resend — sending account email.
• Google Maps Platform — turning an area you type into a location.
• Cloudflare — bot protection on sign-in and signup.
• Our hosting providers — running the API, database, and website.

We also disclose data where the law requires it, to enforce our Terms, or to protect someone from harm.

Some of these providers are outside Nigeria. Where data is transferred abroad we rely on the transfer conditions permitted under the NDPA and require appropriate safeguards.

Passwords are hashed. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Sign-in, signup, and password reset are rate limited and captcha-protected. Access to production data is restricted to staff who need it.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach is likely to result in a risk to your rights, we will notify you and the Nigeria Data Protection Commission as the NDPA requires.

• Your profile and activity: while your account is open.
• After you delete your account: removed or anonymised, except as below.
• Transaction records: retained as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• Safety records — reports, blocks, and bans: retained so a banned user cannot simply return.
• Security logs: a short period, for investigating abuse.

Under the NDPA you can ask us to:

• give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• correct anything inaccurate — most of it you can edit yourself on your profile;
• delete your account and data;
• restrict or object to certain processing;
• withdraw consent where we relied on it, without affecting what came before.

Write to privacy@hivenigeria.com. We respond within 30 days. If you are unhappy with our answer you can complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.

We use cookies that are necessary for the service: keeping you signed in, remembering your session, and protecting forms from abuse. We do not use advertising cookies.

HIVE is not for anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to a child we will close it and delete the data.

We will update this policy as the service changes. The effective date above tells you which version you are reading, and we will give notice of material changes in the app or by email.