The short version
Husssle needs your phone number to sign you in, your first name and estate so the other person knows who is coming, the photos you take of the work, and the ratings people leave. That is essentially all of it.
We do not sell your data, we do not run advertising, and there are no third-party trackers in the app or on this website. Your phone number is hidden from other users until you and one other person have agreed to work together — then, and only then, the two of you can see each other’s numbers so you can call.
You can delete your account from inside the app, or by emailing us. Your profile, your phone number and your photos are erased. A few things do survive — chiefly the reviews other people wrote about you, kept as their proof of work and no longer linked to you. Delete-account lists every one of them and why.
1. Who we are
Husssle is an odd-jobs marketplace operating in Nairobi, Kenya. In the language of the Data Protection Act, 2019 (Kenya) we are the data controller for the personal data described here. Where the UK GDPR or EU GDPR applies to you — for example because you use Husssle while in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area — we act as controller under those laws too.
Contact for anything in this policy, including data-protection requests: support@husssle.app.
Husssle introduces people to each other. It is not a party to the work, the agreement or the payment between them. That matters for privacy because it means we never see your M-Pesa transactions — the money moves directly between two people, outside our systems.
2. What we collect, and why each thing is needed
We collect the following and nothing else. If a line here is not necessary for the app to work, it is not in the app.
Phone number
Why: it is your login. Husssle has no passwords and no email sign-in — you enter your number, we send a one-time code by SMS, and that code proves the number is yours. It is also how the person you agree to work with reaches you, once you have both agreed. Given by you.
Your name
Why: so that the person waiting at the gate knows who to expect. Other users see your first name and the initial of your surname (“Grace N.”), never the full name unless you type it as your full name yourself. Given by you.
Your area (estate)
Why: to show you jobs near you and to tell a hustler roughly how far a job is. We store the estate you choose — Kilimani, Kileleshwa or Lavington — not a street address and not continuous GPS tracking. We do not follow your location in the background. Given by you.
Job photos and job descriptions
Why: the photo is the job post. It is the entire point of the product: a photo of the blocked drain says what most people cannot put into words. Photos you post are visible to anyone browsing Husssle, so do not photograph documents, screens, faces or anything you would not put on a public noticeboard. Given by you.
Skills, and a short bio, if you add them
Why: to help a poster choose between applicants. Optional — the app works without them. Given by you.
Ratings and reviews
Why: reviews in both directions are the safety mechanism of the whole marketplace. We store the star rating, the text, which job it relates to, who wrote it and who it is about, and we compute an average, a count of finished jobs and a level (New, Proven, Trusted) from them. Given by you and by other users about you.
Job activity
Why: so the lifecycle can run — which jobs you posted, which you applied for, which you were picked for, and the status and timestamps of each. This is also what lets a job auto-complete 48 hours after a worker marks it finished. Created by your use of the app.
Reports you make, and messages you send us
Why: so we can investigate abuse, fraud and unsafe behaviour, and reply to you. This includes what you send us on WhatsApp or by email. Given by you.
What we never collect: your ID number, your M-Pesa PIN or statements, your bank details, your contacts list, your photo gallery beyond the picture you deliberately attach to a post, your precise or background location, or anything about you from data brokers. We have no advertising business, so there is nothing for us to gain by holding more than the list above.
Notifications: we hold one push token per device, issued by Firebase Cloud Messaging, so that a job update can reach your phone. It identifies the device, not you; it is removed when you sign out and when you delete your account. We carry no crash-reporting, analytics or advertising SDK of any kind, so we collect no crash logs, no device model and no advertising identifier, and we do not track you across other companies' apps or websites.
3. Our lawful basis for using it
Under section 30 of the Data Protection Act, 2019 and Article 6 of the GDPR, we rely on:
- Performance of a contract with you — your phone number, name, area, job posts, applications, job activity and reviews. Without these, there is no service to give you: we cannot sign you in, cannot show your post to anyone, and cannot let you be chosen.
- Consent — camera and photo access. You grant these in the operating system’s own prompt and can withdraw them at any time in your phone’s settings. Withdrawing consent does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.
- Legitimate interests — keeping the marketplace safe and honest: investigating reports, detecting fraud and fake listings, enforcing our Terms, and blocking users who abuse people. We have weighed this against your interests; it is limited to what safety actually requires. You may object (see Your rights).
- Legal obligation — where Kenyan law requires us to keep or produce records, for example in response to a lawful order from a court or a competent authority.
We do not carry out automated decision-making that produces legal effects for you. Levels (New, Proven, Trusted) are calculated automatically from your finished jobs and average rating, and they change how many jobs you may hold at once; a human will review that calculation on request if you think it is wrong.
4. What other users can see about you
- Always visible on your profile: your first name and surname initial, your area, your average rating, how many jobs you have finished, your level, your skills and bio if you added them, and the reviews people have written about you.
- Visible on a job you post: the photo, the description, the pay you offered, the estate and the timing.
- Hidden until you both agree: your phone number. It is revealed to exactly one other person — the poster and the worker on a job — at the moment the poster picks that worker, so the two of you can call or use WhatsApp. It is never shown to applicants who were not chosen, never listed publicly, and never shown on this website.
- Never visible to anyone: your device token, your diagnostic data, the reports you file (the person you report is not told who reported them), and anything you send our support team.
Once you are working together, whatever you then say to each other on the phone or on WhatsApp happens outside Husssle and is not covered by this policy. Husssle has no in-app chat, so we do not hold, read or store your conversations.
6. How long we keep it
We keep personal data only while it has a job to do.
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Account: phone number, name, area, skills, bio | While your account exists. Deleted within 30 days of you deleting your account. |
| One-time sign-in codes | Minutes. They expire and are discarded; we do not build a history of them. |
| Job photos (held by Cloudflare, see section 5) | While the job is live, then 12 months after it completes so both sides can refer to what was agreed. Erased from Cloudflare R2 when you delete your account — the files, not just the link to them. If that erasure fails for technical reasons it is recorded and finished afterwards, never quietly abandoned. |
| Job posts, applications and job history | 24 months after the job completes, for dispute resolution and fraud detection. Deleted or fully anonymised on account deletion. |
| Reviews and ratings | While the accounts and the job they belong to exist. When you delete your account, reviews split two ways. Reviews you wrote: the text is erased and your name is replaced with “Deleted user”; the bare star score stays inside the other person’s average, because otherwise anyone could wipe a rating another person spent months earning by closing their own account. Reviews written about you: these are not deleted. They stay as that author’s proof of work, carrying a random account identifier instead of any link to you, and with your profile gone there is nowhere for them to appear. See delete-account for the full reasoning. |
| Reports you file, and records of abuse or fraud | 24 months after the case is closed, so a banned person cannot immediately return. A report keeps the account identifier of whoever filed it and what they wrote, because a safety record that can be erased by the person who filed it is not a safety record. Deleting your account does not delete reports you filed. |
| Support correspondence | 24 months. |
| Anonymised counts (for example the public “hustles completed” number) | Indefinitely. These are plain numbers with no link to any person and are no longer personal data. |
| Anything Kenyan law requires us to retain | For the period that law specifies, and no longer. |
Encrypted backups cycle out on a rolling basis and any deleted data is gone from them within 30 days of deletion.
7. Your rights
Under Part IV of the Data Protection Act, 2019 — and Chapter III of the GDPR where it applies to you — you have the right to:
- Be informed of how your data is used. That is this document.
- Access the personal data we hold about you, and a copy of it.
- Correction of anything inaccurate or incomplete. Your name, area, skills and bio you can correct yourself in the app, at once.
- Deletion — “erasure” — of your data. See how to delete your account. There is a full delete inside the app; you do not have to ask us.
- Portability — a copy of the data you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, and the right to have it sent to another controller where technically feasible. There is no self-service export button in this version: email support@husssle.app and a person will compile and send your data as a JSON file within 30 days.
- Object to processing based on legitimate interests, including profiling. Tell us why, and we will stop unless there are compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests.
- Restrict processing while a dispute about accuracy or lawfulness is being worked out.
- Withdraw consent at any time, where we relied on consent — for example camera or photo-library access.
- Not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that significantly affects you, and to ask a human to review one.
- Complain to a regulator (below).
To use any of these, email support@husssle.app from the number or with details matching your account, or write to us from inside the app. We respond within 30 days. If a request is unusually complex we may take longer, and will tell you why inside those 30 days. Exercising these rights is free; we will not charge you and will not treat you differently for asking.
Because your login is a phone number, we may verify a request by sending a one-time code to that number. This is to stop someone else deleting or downloading your account, and the code is discarded once used.
8. How to delete your account
In the app: Profile → Settings → Delete my account. It is a real deletion, not a deactivation.
If you no longer have the app, email support@husssle.app with the subject line Delete my account.
The full detail — exactly what is erased, what survives as anonymised numbers, and why — is on the account deletion page. Everything is done within 30 days.
9. Children
Husssle is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account, because the app arranges paid work and puts two strangers in contact with each other. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18.
If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we close it and delete the data without waiting to be asked. If you believe a child has an account, tell us at support@husssle.app and we will act on it the same day.
10. International transfers
Husssle runs on two providers, and neither keeps your data only in Kenya:
- Google Firebase holds your account, your profile, your job posts and your reviews, on Google servers that may be located outside Kenya, including in the European Union and the United States.
- Cloudflare holds your job photos, in R2 object storage, on Cloudflare infrastructure that likewise may sit outside Kenya.
Section 48 of the Data Protection Act, 2019 allows a transfer out of Kenya where there are appropriate safeguards, or where the transfer is necessary to perform a contract with you. Both apply here: the transfer is necessary for the app to function at all, and the data-processing terms of both providers — Google’s, and Cloudflare’s data-processing addendum — include the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses along with technical measures such as encryption in transit and at rest. Where the GDPR applies, those same Standard Contractual Clauses are the transfer mechanism under Article 46.
You may ask us for details of the safeguards in place by emailing support@husssle.app.
11. Security
- All traffic between the app, this website and our servers is encrypted with TLS. Data at rest is encrypted by the provider holding it — Google for Firestore and Authentication, Cloudflare for the photos in R2.
- No key to the photo storage exists on your phone. Every upload and every deletion goes through a small server of ours that checks who you are first, so a modified app cannot overwrite or delete anyone else’s photos, and the storage credentials never leave our infrastructure. (Viewing is different and deliberately open: a job photo is a public advertisement, which is why section 2 warns you never to photograph documents or faces.)
- There are no passwords to steal. Sign-in is a one-time code sent to your number, and codes expire.
- Server-side security rules decide what each account may read or write, so a modified app cannot reach another person’s data. The lifecycle rules that matter — accepting an applicant, revealing phone numbers, completing a job, counting a review — run on the server, not on your phone.
- Phone numbers are withheld from other users until a poster and a worker have agreed to a job.
- Access to production data is limited to the people who operate the service, and only when there is a reason.
No system is perfectly secure and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, as section 43 of the Act requires, and we will tell affected users directly and plainly.
12. This website
husssle.app is static HTML and CSS. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, loads no third-party fonts, scripts or trackers, and has no need for a cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to. That is why you were not shown one.
Our host keeps ordinary web-server logs — IP address, time, page requested, user agent — for security and troubleshooting, and deletes them within 30 days. Links out of this site (WhatsApp, your email client, the app stores when they go live) take you to services with their own privacy policies.
13. Changes to this policy
When we change this policy we update the version and date at the top. If a change is material — a new category of data, a new recipient, a new purpose — we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and where the law requires consent we will ask for it rather than assume it. Old versions are available on request.
14. Contact and complaints
Data protection questions, access requests, corrections, deletions, objections: support@husssle.app. We answer within 30 days, usually much sooner.
If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to a regulator. In Kenya that is the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC), whose contact details and complaint form are published at odpc.go.ke. If you are in the EEA or the UK, you may instead complain to your national supervisory authority or to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
We would rather you told us first — most complaints are a misunderstanding we can fix in a day.