Privacy Policy

Braabby is an online tutoring platform for the Cameroon GCE (Ordinary and Advanced Level), operated from Cameroon and available at braabby.com. In this document "Braabby", "we", "us" and "our" mean the operator of that platform; "you" means the person accepting this document.

Registered particulars — company name, legal form, RCCM number, taxpayer number and registered office — are filed with the competent Cameroonian authorities and are stated in full on our published company information page. Where this document must name the contracting entity, that entity is the registered operator of Braabby.

Correspondence: legal@braabby.com for legal notices, privacy@braabby.com for data-protection requests, and the in-app Help & Support centre for everything else.

Braabby teaches school-age learners, and every Braabby teacher is an adult. A learner under 18 may use Braabby ONLY under the direct supervision of a parent or legal guardian. This is a condition of using the platform, not a recommendation, and it applies to every lesson, every message and every payment. (Separately, any student under 21 uses Braabby under the responsibility of a parent or guardian, who accepts these documents on their behalf.)

What direct supervision means

• A parent or guardian must know when each lesson is scheduled, and must be at home and reachable while it takes place.
• Lessons are live video with an adult. The parent or guardian must be able to see and hear the lesson at any moment, and may sit in on any lesson, at any time, without asking. No teacher may object to a parent being present, and no teacher may ask a learner to be alone, to close a door, or to move to a room where they cannot be seen.
• The parent or guardian should read the learner's messages with teachers from time to time. Every conversation stays on Braabby precisely so that a parent can do this.
• The account belongs to the family. The guardian is responsible for what is done through it — bookings, coins, messages and conduct — and should hold the password rather than leave it with a young child.
• A learner under 18 who cannot be supervised in this way should not use Braabby.

What Braabby does on its side

• Every teacher is identity-checked against a government ID and their qualifications are reviewed by a person before they may teach a single lesson.
• All teaching happens in Braabby's own classroom and all messaging happens on Braabby. A teacher may not move a learner to WhatsApp, a personal number, or any channel a parent cannot see. Asking to is a serious breach and grounds for immediate removal.
• Lessons are one-to-one or small groups of no more than three students, and the platform records who attended and for how long.
• Messages may be reviewed where there is a safeguarding concern, as set out in our Privacy Policy.
• A concern about any teacher's conduct can be reported from the lesson or the chat at any time. It reaches a person, and a teacher may be suspended while it is reviewed.

If anything about a teacher's behaviour worries you — a request to talk privately elsewhere, contact outside lesson times, questions that have nothing to do with the subject, or anything that makes a learner uncomfortable — stop the lesson and report it through Help & Support, or email legal@braabby.com. Tell us even if you are not sure. We would far rather review something harmless than miss something that mattered.

Braabby is the data controller for personal data processed through the platform. You can contact us about privacy at privacy@braabby.com or through the in-app Help & Support.

• Account data: name, email, phone (mobile-money) number, password (stored only as a secure one-way hash), role and language levels.
• Identity & verification data: identity documents and selfies you submit for review, and — for teachers — your date of birth, which we verify against your ID to confirm you are at least 18.
• Learning data: subjects, level, bookings, attendance records, cancellations and reschedules, class blackboard content, the topics you mark as understood (your study progress), any study timetable you create, ratings and reviews, and — for teachers — your reliability score and Gold Teacher status.
• Payments data: coin purchases and balances, payout details, and transaction records (card/MoMo details are handled by the payment provider, not stored by us).
• Donation data: if you choose to give or become a monthly supporter, the name, email, phone and amount you provide to process and acknowledge your gift (you may choose to give anonymously).
• Usage & security data: device and browser information, IP address, sign-in events, and activity needed to run and secure the service.
• Content you provide: messages, support chats and uploads.

• To create and run your account and deliver classes;
• To process payments, coins and teacher payouts;
• To verify teachers (and student IDs) and keep the platform safe;
• To provide in-app help and support;
• To send service messages (e.g. verification codes, new-device sign-in alerts, notifications);
• To prevent fraud and abuse, comply with the law, and improve the service.

We process your data to perform our contract with you (providing the service), to meet legal obligations, for our legitimate interest in running a safe and sustainable platform, and — where required — with your consent (which you can withdraw).

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only as needed to run Braabby, with providers acting on our instructions:

• Hosting & database; cloud storage for files such as teacher photos and intro videos;
• Email and SMS providers (verification codes, alerts, notifications);
• Mobile-money / card payment providers (payments and payouts);
• Authorities, where required by Cameroonian law or to protect users and Braabby.

Some providers may process data outside Cameroon. Where this happens, we take reasonable steps so your data continues to be protected to a standard consistent with Cameroonian law.

We keep personal data only as long as needed for the purposes above, to meet legal, accounting and dispute-resolution obligations, and to keep the platform safe. You may ask us to delete data subject to those obligations.

We use technical and organisational measures including hashed passwords, secure session cookies, role-based staff access on a need-to-know basis, audit logging of staff actions, two-step sign-in, one-time codes (OTP) to confirm password resets, contact-detail changes and teacher withdrawals, sign-in monitoring and brute-force lockout. No system is perfectly secure, but we work hard to protect your information.

Braabby teaches minors, so we take safeguarding seriously. Trained members of our Trust & Safety team may read the messages exchanged between a teacher and a student — including messages that were later edited or deleted, which we retain for this purpose — where there is a safeguarding, fraud, abuse or dispute concern, or where a report or support request requires it.

We do not notify the people in a conversation when a review takes place. We are telling you here instead, because a review that announced itself could not protect a child from grooming, threats or coercion — the behaviour would simply move or stop while staff were watching. Staff never join, post in or alter a conversation; they read it.

Because this is an intrusion, it is bounded and it is recorded:

• Access is limited to staff whose role requires it. A customer-support agent can open only a conversation attached to an open support request; a case handler can open only conversations on a case assigned to them; unrestricted access is held by a small number of Trust & Safety and senior staff.
• Every time a member of staff opens a conversation we record who they were, when, from which device and network, why, and how long they read for. That record cannot be edited or deleted by the person who created it.
• Exporting a transcript is a separate, narrower permission, and every export is recorded with a watermark identifying who took it and when.
• During an investigation a conversation may be frozen, which means nobody — including the teacher and the student — can edit or delete messages in it until the review ends. You will see a message explaining this if you try.
• Staff conduct is itself audited: the log of who read what is reviewed by senior staff, who cannot alter it either.

You may ask us whether your conversations have been reviewed by writing to privacy@braabby.com. We will tell you, unless doing so would prejudice an active safeguarding investigation or we are required by law not to.

Subject to Cameroonian law, you may ask to access, correct, update or delete your personal data, object to or restrict certain processing, and withdraw consent. Contact privacy@braabby.com. You also have the right to complain to the competent authority (ANTIC).

Braabby is used by GCE learners, including minors, under the responsibility of a parent or guardian who manages the account. We collect only what is needed to provide education safely. A parent/guardian may exercise the rights above on a minor's behalf.

We use a small number of first-party cookies and similar on-device storage: essential ones to sign you in and keep the service secure; functional ones to run features such as the live classroom; and preference ones that remember your choices — for example your interface language and your light or dark appearance. We may also read your device's appearance setting to match the theme the first time you visit. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and we never sell your data to advertisers.

We send essential service messages (verification codes, security alerts, booking and payment notices) as part of running your account. Any non-essential updates are optional — manage notification preferences in Settings and unsubscribe at any time.

If a personal-data breach is likely to affect you, we will act promptly to contain it and notify affected users and the competent authority where the law requires.

We use our own first-party, privacy-respecting analytics to understand how the service is used and improve it. It is cookie-less, honours your browser's “Do Not Track” signal, and does not store raw IP addresses — only a coarse, non-identifying country or region derived from network information. We do not sell this data or use it for third-party advertising.

We may update this policy; we will post the new version with a fresh date and, for material changes, notify you in the app.

Questions about this document? Reach us through the in-app Help & Support centre, or by email at legal@braabby.com (privacy matters: privacy@braabby.com). We aim to respond promptly.

This document is a template prepared for Braabby and should be reviewed by a qualified Cameroonian legal practitioner before being relied upon.