Trust & privacy

Privacy Notice.

This notice describes what personal data SHENGO collects, where it lives today, who can see it, and what your rights are, as the platform actually operates during its testing phase, not as it is planned to operate once later infrastructure is built.

PRIVACY NOTICE v0.1 DRAFT · UNDER REVIEW · TESTING PHASE · AUGUST 2026

1. Who we are

SHENGO is an AI assisted policy consultation platform built for use in Ethiopia. It lets citizens, civil society representatives, domain experts, policy makers, and, where enabled, donor organisations take part in structured consultations run by a ministry or other commissioning body. SHENGO is currently in a testing and pilot phase. Real infrastructure choices described below, including where data will eventually be hosted, are still being built out, and this notice will be updated as that changes.

2. What personal data we collect

When you register, we collect the email address or account you sign in with, and any name, institution, or region you choose to provide. When you take part in a consultation, we collect the text of your submission, the language you chose to write in, your stated position on the question being asked, and, if you provide it, your region. We do not currently collect a phone number as part of registration. The exact fields asked for on the sign up and submission screens are the accurate, current list at any given time; this notice describes the categories in general terms.

Separately from anything you type, some technical information about your browser is examined when you use the site: for page performance measurement, for an automated check that a form submission came from a person rather than from software, and, only if you accept it, for analytics. Section 10 sets out what each of those does, which of them you can decline, and why two of them run for every visitor.

3. Where your data is stored

What	Where, today
Registration and submission data	Google Cloud Firestore, africa-south1 region, physically located in Johannesburg, South Africa
In-Ethiopia hosting	Planned for later, not yet built. This notice will say so plainly until it changes, rather than describe a future plan as if it were already true

4. Whether your submissions are anonymised

Not yet. Today, your consultation submission is stored together with your account identifier, and platform administrators are able to see who submitted what. SHENGO's design intent is to build a system that separates a participant's identity from their submission before it is processed further, but that system is not built and switched on yet. This notice will be updated the moment that changes, and until then no part of the platform should be understood to anonymise your submission automatically.

5. Who can see your data

Who	What they can see
Platform administrators	Registration information and submissions, as part of running the platform and preparing consultation results
Commissioning ministry or organisation	The reviewed, human confirmed synthesis summary for its own consultation, not your individual raw submission
A donor, where a donor tier applies	The same reviewed synthesis summary for the consultation its funding supports
Anyone else	Nothing. SHENGO does not sell your data and does not share it outside the platform except where required by Ethiopian law or a lawful order from a competent authority

6. How long we keep your data

SHENGO has not yet finalised specific retention periods for each category of data described above. Until a specific retention schedule is published here, data is kept only for as long as needed to run the pilot and produce consultation results, and you can ask for your account data to be deleted as described in section 8. Once a synthesis report has been reviewed, confirmed, and delivered to a commissioning body, the record of that result becomes part of the consultation's official history and may not be able to be deleted, since it may already have informed a real decision or been shared onward.

7. Ethiopia's Personal Data Protection Proclamation

Ethiopia's Personal Data Protection Proclamation No. 1321/2024 applies to how personal data is handled in Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian Communications Authority is, as we understand it, the body responsible for overseeing it. SHENGO intends to operate consistently with this law and is working toward full compliance as the platform moves out of its testing phase. This notice does not claim that SHENGO is fully compliant today, and will be corrected immediately if any part of it is found to overstate where things stand.

8. Your rights

Under Ethiopian data protection law, you generally have the right to ask what personal data SHENGO holds about you, to ask for inaccurate data to be corrected, to ask for your data to be deleted where it is no longer needed, and to object to certain uses of your data, along with other rights available to you under Ethiopian law. To exercise any of these, contact compliance@shengo.com.et and describe what you are asking for. SHENGO will respond as promptly as it reasonably can. If you believe your rights have not been respected, you may also be able to raise it with the Ethiopian Communications Authority.

9. Technical and security information

Connections to SHENGO are encrypted in transit. Access to stored data is restricted by role, so that, for example, a citizen account cannot read another participant's raw submission. SHENGO keeps a record of certain platform events, such as sign ins and role approvals, as part of its own accountability trail. SHENGO does not use advertising trackers and does not sell data to advertisers. Analytics, performance measurement and the automated abuse check are described in section 10, which says plainly which of them you can decline and which run for everyone.

10. Analytics, performance measurement, and automated abuse checks

Three things on this site look at your browser rather than at what you type. One is optional and two are not. They are described here because a check that examines a visitor's browser deserves disclosure even when it does not identify anyone.

Analytics, which is optional. SHENGO uses Google Analytics to understand how the site is used in aggregate. It runs only if you accept it in the choice offered at the bottom of the page, it does not run if you decline, and IP addresses are anonymised. You can decline and use every part of the platform normally.

An abuse check on form submissions, which is not optional. When you submit a form, SHENGO uses Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise to judge whether the request came from a person or from automated software. To do that it examines signals from your browser and from how the page was used, such as device and browser characteristics and interaction patterns. It is not given your name, your email address, or the text of your submission. It is currently in monitoring mode, which means it scores requests and records the result but does not block anything yet. The purpose is narrow: a public consultation that can be flooded by automated submissions is not a consultation, and this protects the record that everyone else contributes to.

Page performance measurement, which is not optional. SHENGO measures how quickly pages load. This is aggregate technical measurement, and it carries no identifier that would let SHENGO recognise you from one visit to the next. It is how SHENGO knows whether the site works on a slow connection, which in Ethiopia is not a minor question.

Why two of the three sit outside the accept or decline choice. This was a deliberate decision and it is worth stating rather than burying. Turning the abuse check off for visitors who decline analytics would make declining a way to bypass it, which defeats the point of having it. Performance measurement tells SHENGO whether the site is usable at all. Neither is advertising and neither profiles you. SHENGO's position is that the honest answer is to run both for every visitor and disclose them here, rather than to leave them undisclosed or to weaken them.

Who processes this. All three are Google services acting as SHENGO's processor, and the data they handle is subject to Google's terms for those services. SHENGO does not use any of them for advertising and does not sell the data they produce.

11. Changes to this notice

This notice will change as SHENGO's real infrastructure and features change, particularly around data anonymisation and Ethiopian hosted storage. When it changes in a way that matters to you, SHENGO will make a reasonable effort to let registered participants know. Material changes are versioned, dated, and announced on this page before they take effect.

Status. Version 0.2, last updated 10 September 2026. SHENGO is in its testing phase. Version 0.1 was a first draft written to describe the platform honestly as it actually operates today, replacing an earlier internal draft that had described planned future infrastructure as if it were already in place. Version 0.2 adds section 10, because the site runs an automated abuse check and page performance measurement on every visitor and this notice had not said so. It has not yet been reviewed by qualified legal counsel and should not be treated as final. Version 1.0 will be adopted once that review is complete.

Contact

Data privacy questions and requests: compliance@shengo.com.et
General: contact@shengo.com.et

This Privacy Notice is available in Amharic upon request. / ይህ የግላዊነት ማስታወቂያ በፈለጉ ጊዜ በአማርኛ ያገኛሉ።