Privacy Policy

Who we are

Usiku (usiku.co.ke and the Usiku apps) helps you find nights out in Nairobi and book tables at partner venues. Usiku is the data controller for the personal data described here. Questions or requests: [email protected].

What we collect

• Account: your name, email address and sign-in details, and the preferences and profile answers you choose to give.
• Bookings and orders: the venue, night, party size, contact number and notes on a reservation; bottles you order; and, for split bills and gifts, the first name and email of each person who pays a share.
• Payments: payments are processed by Paystack. We receive the amount, a reference, the payment status and the card's issuing country. We never see or store your full card number or M-Pesa PIN.
• Venue credit: credit balances, top-ups, redemptions and refunds.
• Ratings and content: venue ratings you leave and anything you submit to claim a DJ or host profile.
• Usage: the pages you open and what you tap on our site, stored by us to improve the product. The only identifier on these records is your account if you are signed in; the record never includes payment or gift link tokens.
• Field agents only: if you join our live-accuracy team, the GPS location and photos you submit with a venue reading. Photos are deleted after 30 days.
• Venue teams: the name and email of people a venue adds to its portal.

Why we use it

• To provide the service you ask for — confirming bookings, sending your order to the venue, collecting and refunding payments (performance of a contract).
• To send confirmations and service messages by email, WhatsApp or SMS about a booking you made.
• To keep Usiku secure, prevent fraud and meet legal and tax obligations (legitimate interest and legal obligation).
• To understand how the product is used and improve it (legitimate interest), and — only with your consent — to measure our marketing and show our ads to people who have visited (consent).

We do not sell your personal data.

Who we share it with

• The venue you book: your name, party size, night, contact number and order, so they can seat and serve you.
• Service providers who process data for us under contract: Clerk (sign-in), Neon (database), Vercel (hosting and file storage), Paystack (payments), Resend (email), Kapso / WhatsApp and Africa's Talking (messages), Sentry (error reports), Upstash (rate limiting) and Apify (reading public Instagram posts about events).
• Only if you accept cookies: Google (Google Analytics) and Meta (the Meta Pixel).
• Authorities when the law requires it.

Some of these providers store data outside Kenya. Where they do, we rely on contractual safeguards and the provider's security measures, as the Data Protection Act allows.

Cookies

Essential (always on): keeping you signed in (Clerk), remembering your high-contrast setting, and remembering your cookie choice. Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights measure page performance without cookies and without identifying you.

Analytics and marketing (only if you choose “Accept all”): Google Analytics, which measures visits, and the Meta Pixel, which lets us measure and target our ads on Facebook and Instagram. You can change your mind at any time with “Cookie settings” at the bottom of every page.

How long we keep it

Account data is kept while your account is open. Booking, order and payment records are kept as long as tax and accounting law requires. Field-agent photos are deleted after 30 days. When you delete your account in Settings we remove your sign-in and personal profile; records we must keep by law are retained without being used for anything else.

Your rights

Under Kenya's Data Protection Act, 2019 you can ask to access, correct or delete your data, object to or restrict how we use it, withdraw consent, and move your data to another service. Email [email protected]; we reply within the time the Act sets. If you are unhappy with our answer you can complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (odpc.go.ke).

Drink preferences

If you tell us what you drink, we keep up to three drink types, whether you don't drink alcohol, whether you want brand offers, and your date of birth. We use them only to put the bottles that fit you first when you pre-order, to keep alcohol offers to guests 18 and over, and, if you turned brand offers on, to show you one labelled brand bottle. A brand never receives your name, number or answers, only totals across many guests. You can change or delete all of it, date of birth included, under Account, Your drinks.

Age

Usiku is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger.

Changes

We will update the date at the top when this policy changes, and tell account holders by email about any significant change.