Privacy
This policy describes how information is handled when people visit Bulawayo1872.com, write to its editors, subscribe to The Bulawayo Letter or offer memories and archival material. Read with the terms of use and the contribution guidelines.
The site is a set of fixed files. It has no accounts, no logins, no comment system and no database, and it sets no cookies of its own. What follows is mostly an account of three other companies — the one that serves the pages, the one that sends the letter, and the one that sells the advertising.
1. Who is responsible
numo uno Technologies, as publisher and operator of Bulawayo1872.com, determines how personal information is used for the activities described here, except where a separately identified third party acts independently. Please contact us using the details at the foot of this page if you have a question about your information.
2. Information collected
Website visits. The site is served by Cloudflare, whose network generates request logs — IP address, device and browser information, the page requested, the time and the referring page — in order to serve pages and block attacks. Those logs are Cloudflare’s; this site does not store them, does not receive them per visitor, and has no mechanism for looking up what any individual reader has read. What the publisher can see is aggregate counts.
No analytics. There is no analytics software on this site. No Google Analytics, no measurement tag, no pixel, no heatmap, no session recorder. The old site carried a Universal Analytics tag; it is not carried over.
The Bulawayo Letter. Your email address, and nothing else. The form asks for no name. The letter is sent by Kit (kit.com, United States), which records your address, the date you asked for it, whether you confirmed, and its own delivery records. Confirmation is required: you are sent an email with a link, and you are not added until you click it, so nobody can subscribe you. Whether Kit’s open- and click-tracking is switched on for this list is still to be confirmed in the Kit account.
Enquiries. When you write to us, we have your name, your email address, your message and anything you attach, in an ordinary mailbox, for as long as the correspondence is useful. The mail provider behind the published address is still to be identified here.
Archival submissions. Photographs, recordings, documents, captions, memories, names and biographical details, provenance, rights statements, credit preferences, publication permissions and the correspondence about them. Some of this material identifies living people, and some of it identifies people who were children at the time. This is the most sensitive information the project holds and it is handled under the contribution guidelines.
Advertising. The site carries advertising from Google AdSense, which is the only third-party script on it. Google and its advertising partners set cookies in your browser to measure, and — where you have agreed to it — personalise what you are shown. Google’s own account of what it collects is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. Section 6 below says which pages carry it and which do not.
Transactions. None. Nothing is sold on this site and there is no checkout. If that changes, the terms covering it will be published before anything is offered for sale.
Please avoid sending unnecessary sensitive personal information. Possession of a historical item does not necessarily establish consent from every person identified in it.
3. Why information is used
To operate and secure the website; to answer correspondence; to send a letter to the people who asked for it; to review, attribute, preserve and publish historical contributions with appropriate permission; to keep records of rights and corrections; and to meet legal requirements.
The lawful basis for each of these activities under the laws that apply is still to be documented by the publisher, rather than assumed to be one basis covering everything.
4. The public archive, and people in the stories
A contribution chosen for publication may be read anywhere in the world, copied by readers and indexed by search engines. We aim to keep confidential correspondence separate from material approved for publication. Where information concerns identifiable living people — particularly children, or sensitive matters — privacy, context, accuracy and any restriction asked for are all weighed before publication.
Named portraits of people who were children when the photograph was taken are held back until the person, or their family, agrees. A published item may remain in the record even where copies elsewhere cannot be recalled; removal requests are assessed case by case.
5. The Bulawayo Letter
You are sent the letter only after you have asked for it and confirmed by email. The evidence of that request and confirmation is kept for as long as you are subscribed. Every letter carries an unsubscribe link; unsubscribing removes you from the list. Permission to publish a photograph is never treated as permission to add its sender to a mailing list.
6. Cookies and third-party content
This site sets no cookies of its own and stores nothing in your browser. The cookies you may encounter here are:
- Google advertising cookies, set by AdSense on the pages that carry advertising.
- A consent cookie, set by the consent message described below in order to remember your choice.
There is no advertising, and therefore no Google script and no advertising cookie, on the home page, on the contact page, on this page or the other policy pages, on any index, on any photograph gallery, or on any page with fewer than about 150 words on it. No page carries more than two advertising slots. That is not a promise in prose: the build fails if an advertising script reaches a page that this paragraph says is free of it.
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, a consent message appears before any advertising cookie is set, and you can refuse personalised advertising. You can change that choice later by clearing this site’s cookies, which brings the message back.
7. Who else receives information
- Cloudflare — serves the pages; sees request data as described in section 2.
- Kit (United States) — holds the newsletter list and sends the letter.
- Google — serves the advertising and sets its cookies.
- An ordinary email provider for correspondence.
Contributors’ approved names, credits and material are made public as agreed. Information may be disclosed where the law requires it, or in order to investigate a rights or security concern. Advertisers and sponsors are given no right to reuse contributors’ correspondence, photographs, or the subscriber list.
8. Processing outside Zimbabwe
The publisher is in Zimbabwe; the readers are all over the world and so are the services. Cloudflare serves the pages from whichever of its locations is nearest the reader. Kit holds the newsletter list in the United States. The transfer arrangements for those services, and any notification or approval required under Zimbabwean law, are still to be assessed by the publisher.
9. How long information is kept
Newsletter records: while you are subscribed, plus the record needed to honour an unsubscribe. Correspondence: as long as the enquiry or dispute needs it. Request logs: Cloudflare’s own retention, not ours. Approved archival items, with their attribution, provenance and permissions: kept for the long term, because that is what an archive is for, subject to review when rights or privacy require it.
10. Security
Everything is served over HTTPS. There is no database, no user accounts and no administrative login on the public site, which removes most of the ways a website leaks personal information. Contributions and correspondence live in the publisher’s own mailbox and files, with access restricted to the publisher. No system can promise absolute security.
11. Your rights and choices
Subject to the law and to legitimate exemptions, you may ask whether information about you is held, ask for access to it or correction of it, object to a particular use, withdraw a consent where processing rests on consent, or ask for removal or restriction. Requests about historical records are weighed against rights, legal obligations and the archive’s purpose. We may ask for reasonable proof of identity before disclosing personal information.
Write to the address at the foot of this page and describe the record or the request. If you are not satisfied with how a request has been handled, you can complain to a data-protection authority: in Zimbabwe, the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (POTRAZ), which is the Data Protection Authority under the Data Protection Act of 2021; in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, your own national supervisory authority.
12. Children
The site is for a general audience and is not designed to collect information from children. There is no submission form on it at all: the only form is the newsletter, which asks for an email address and nothing else, and everything else arrives by email. If a parent or guardian sends material involving a child, we ask them to say so and to confirm that they have the authority to. Publication may be withheld while a child’s privacy and welfare are considered.
13. Other websites
Links lead to other websites, social platforms and services, which handle information under their own notices. Some links on the older pages here are twenty years old and lead somewhere unintended. Please read a site’s own notices before giving it anything.
14. Changes
This policy is revised when the services or the legal obligations change. The version posted carries its date. A revised policy never retrospectively creates permission to publish something that was given to us in confidence.