How Motheo collects, uses, and protects the personal information of residents and venue admins who use the app.
Motheo (“Motheo”, “we”, “us”) operates a laundry booking and queueing platform for shared laundry rooms, accessible via our website and app at motheo-app.co.za (the “Service”). This policy explains what personal information we collect from residents and venue administrators who use the Service, why we collect it, and the choices and rights you have over it.
We process personal information under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (“POPIA”). Where POPIA uses terms like “responsible party” and “operator”, this policy uses the more familiar “we” and “our service providers” — the legal meaning is the same.
The responsible party for the personal information described in this policy is:
We haven’t appointed a separate Information Officer at this stage; until we do, direct all POPIA requests to the contact above.
We only collect what the Service actually needs to run — there’s no advertising profile being built here. In practice, that’s:
If you sign in with Google instead, we receive your name and email address from Google’s identity service, and never see your Google password.
Which laundry venue you belong to, or have asked to join, and whether a venue admin has approved that request. If you administer a venue, we also hold the machine pricing and floor layout you configure for it.
Which machine you booked or queued for, your position in that queue, and when a session started, ended, and how long it ran.
Machine sessions are paid for through Paystack. We store the payment’s reference number, amount, and status (pending, confirmed, failed) — we do not receive or store your card number, expiry date, or CVV; Paystack handles those directly.
A log of the notifications we’ve sent you (activation codes, turn alerts, password resets) and your delivery preferences (email, WhatsApp, in-app) — kept so we can debug a notification that didn’t arrive, and so we honour your preferences.
Standard web request data (IP address, browser type) generated by using the Service, and a sign-in token stored in your browser to keep you logged in — see §12.
We rely on one of the following under POPIA for each use above:
We don’t sell personal information. We share it only with the parties needed to run the Service:
Each of these processes information on our instructions, under a contract that requires them to protect it — we don’t hand data to anyone who isn’t listed here, except where the law requires it of us.
Some of the providers above operate infrastructure outside South Africa, which means your information may be processed abroad. Where that happens, we only use providers who commit contractually to a level of protection consistent with POPIA’s requirements for cross-border transfers.
We keep your account and booking history for as long as your account is active. If you close your account, we delete or anonymise your personal information within a reasonable period, except:
Passwords are never stored in plain text — only as a one-way cryptographic hash. All traffic between your device and our servers is encrypted (HTTPS). Sign-in sessions use short-lived, signed tokens rather than a persistent session on our servers. No system is unbreachable, but we design the Service with these safeguards deliberately, not as an afterthought.
Under POPIA, you can ask us to:
To exercise any of these, contact us at andleanoai@gmail.com. If you’re not satisfied with our response, you have the right to complain to South Africa’s Information Regulator.
The Service isn’t directed at children, and creating an account requires the ability to pay for a laundry session — we don’t knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we’ll remove it.
We don’t use advertising or tracking cookies. The Service stores one thing in your browser’s local storage: a sign-in token, so you don’t have to log in on every visit. It’s readable only by the Service and is cleared when you sign out.
If we make a material change to how we handle your personal information, we’ll update the date at the top of this page and, where the change is significant, notify you directly through the Service.
Questions, requests, or complaints about this policy go to andleanoai@gmail.com. We’ll acknowledge your request within a reasonable time.