Privacy Policy

Baejá is a voice-led dating and companionship platform for Nigerians, operating at baeja.ng. For the purposes of the NDPA 2023, Baejá is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy — we decide what is collected and why.

This policy covers our website, our web app, our Telegram mini app, and our mobile apps. It does not cover services we link out to, which have their own policies.

Questions, requests or complaints: support@baeja.ng.

Things you give us

Things you create by using Baejá

• Likes and passes — who you shot your shot at, who you passed on, and whether you have seen who liked you.
• Matches and chats — your text messages, voice messages and images, reactions, replies, read receipts, typing indicators, and in-chat games and answers.
• Account activity — when you last used the app, your daily shot and swipe counts, your plan, and your purchase history.
• Blog reading — an anonymous view count per article and an anonymous like count. These are not tied to your account.

Payments

When you buy Gold or a shot pack, the payment itself happens on your chosen payment provider's pages. Your card number, CVV and PIN never reach Baejá's servers. We store a transaction record: the amount, the currency, what it was for, the provider's reference, and whether it succeeded.

Technical data

• IP address — used to stop abuse (limiting how many one-time codes can be requested, and how often an article can be liked or counted as read). It is held briefly as a counter key and then discarded. We do not build a profile from it and it is never used to decide whether you may access anything.
• Push notification token — if you allow notifications, a device token from the push notification service so we can reach that device. It identifies the device, not you personally.
• Device and app details — platform and app version, when you send a support ticket, so we can reproduce a problem.
• Standard server logs generated by our hosting and database providers in the ordinary course of running the service.

We do not run third-party analytics or ad-profiling products of our own on Baejá, and we do not buy or sell data about you.

Some of what a dating profile needs is sensitive personal data under the NDPA, which means it gets extra protection and a stricter basis for use. On Baejá that includes:

• Religion and religious observance, and tribe or ethnic group — optional profile fields, and optional preferences.
• Which genders you want to see — this can reveal your sexual orientation. It is required, because matching cannot work without it.
• Lifestyle answers — smoking and drinking, which can imply health information. Optional.
• Your face check, if you go through verification — images of your face taken to confirm who you are are biometric data.
• Your voice note — a voice recording can identify you, and it is the heart of your profile.

We use these only with your explicit consent, given by choosing to fill them in or to start verification, and only for the purposes in section 4. Every field above except the two marked required can be left blank or cleared later from your profile, and leaving them blank does not stop you using Baejá.

Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time — see section 12. Withdrawing consent does not undo processing that already happened lawfully, and clearing a field used for matching will change the people you see.

Verification is optional. It earns you a Gold Seal, which tells other members that a real person — the one in the photos — is behind the profile.

How it works. You give your explicit consent, then follow a short face check in the app: look straight at the camera, then turn your head left and right in an order that changes every time. The app takes three photos of your face and records how your head moved — the movement is worked out on your own phone; nothing is sent to a third party. One of our trained reviewers compares the photos with your profile photos and makes the decision. So the Gold Seal means our team matched your face to your photos. It is not a check against a government database, and we never claim it is.

No NIN, no ID documents

• We never ask for your NIN, your BVN, or any identity document, and we never record them.
• We keep an audit record: pass, fail or pending, the type of check, the moment you consented, and the head-movement record (angles over time — not an image). That is what proves the check was done properly.
• We ask for your explicit consent, with a timestamp, before any check runs. Without it the check cannot start.

Your face-check photos

Images of your face are among the most sensitive files we hold, and they are treated that way:

• Stored in a private area readable only by you and our verification moderators. They are never linked publicly, never shown to other members, and never used on your profile.
• Rejected: every photo is deleted as soon as the decision is made.
• Approved: we keep one front-facing photo while your account exists and delete the rest. If an account is ever banned for scamming or abuse, our reviewers compare new face checks against the faces of banned members — by eye, with no automated face recognition — so a removed scammer can't simply sign up again. Delete your account and that photo goes with it.
• Banned: if your account is banned, we keep that photo and your first profile photo as evidence, after the account is deleted, like the reports behind the ban. If the ban is lifted, they are deleted.
• If you start a check and never finish, an automatic job deletes the photos within 48 hours. A check that is genuinely still waiting for review is left alone until it is decided.

Members verified before October 2026 went through an earlier check that used an identity document. Those documents were deleted when each decision was made, as this policy then said; none are kept.

• Inside Baejá — signed-in members see your profile when you come up in discovery, when you like each other, or in a chat. Your photos are blurred until they have played your voice note. Gold members can choose to have their photos show unblurred from the start.
• Your photos and voice notes are private files. They are not public URLs that can be guessed, scraped or hotlinked — every request for one goes through a checkpoint that confirms you are signed in and allowed to see that specific file. Voice messages in a chat are only playable by the two people in that chat.
• Outside Baejá — sharing is off by default. If you switch on a share link, whoever holds it sees only your first name, age, city, what you are here for, your interests and whether you are verified. Never your photos, never your voice, never your exact location or contact details. Shared pages are blocked from search engines. Turning the link off, or resetting it, immediately kills every copy you have already sent.
• Our staff — a small number of trained moderators and administrators can see profile content, reports and support tickets in order to do safety work. Access is limited by role and actions are attributed to the person who took them.
• People you block — become invisible to you, and you to them, and any match between you ends.

What we send in a chat, we cannot unsend from the other person's memory or screenshots. Share carefully — see our community rules.

Baejá does not set any cookies of its own. We keep no session cookie, no tracking cookie and no advertising cookie under our own name. What we do use is your browser's local storage, which serves the same purposes and is treated the same way by data protection law, so we set it out here in full.

Everything in the first two groups below is stored on your device only. It is never sent to us as a profile of you, and clearing your browser data removes all of it.

Strictly necessary — the app cannot work without these

These cannot be switched off, because switching them off means you cannot sign in. We do not need your consent for them, and we would not be able to honour a refusal.

Functional and measurement — small conveniences

Clearing these only costs you the convenience. Nothing breaks, and no content becomes inaccessible.

Third-party advertising

Keeping Baejá affordable means advertising helps pay for it, so we may display ads — on our public blog, and in the app for members who are not on Gold. Where we do, they are served by third-party advertising networks rather than by us.

You should know what that means, plainly: these networks set their own cookies and device identifiers, and we do not control or have visibility into them. They use them to cap how often you see an ad, to measure clicks, and to build interest profiles across every other site running the same networks. That is their business, under their own privacy policies, and they act as independent controllers of the data they collect — not as processors for us. We never pass them your profile, your messages, your voice notes, your photos, your email or your verification status.

Your controls:

• Gold members browse ad-free. That is the most complete way to switch third-party advertising off, and it is a deliberate perk rather than an accident.
• Because these networks run their own code, their storage is controlled through your browser and device settings rather than from inside Baejá — see the next two points.
• You can block third-party cookies in your browser settings, or use a content blocker. The rest of Baejá keeps working.
• Mobile systems offer their own controls — “Limit Ad Tracking” on iOS, and resetting or deleting your advertising ID on Android.

We deliberately do not run full-page interstitial ads on the blog, and we never place ads inside your chats.

We do not sell your personal data, and we never have. We share it with service providers who run parts of Baejá for us, bound by contract to use it only on our instructions:

This policy names categories of provider rather than individual companies, so that we can change supplier without rewriting it — and because publishing a detailed map of our systems would help anyone trying to attack them. You can still ask who they are. Write to support@baeja.ng and we will tell you which providers hold your data and where.

We will also disclose data where we are legally obliged to:

• To law enforcement, a court, or a regulator such as the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, in response to a lawful request.
• Where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to prevent serious harm to someone, including a credible threat to life or safety.
• To professional advisers, or to a buyer if Baejá is ever sold or merged — in which case we will tell you before your data moves and this policy continues to apply until you are given a new one.

Baejá is built for Nigeria, but the infrastructure we run on is global. Our infrastructure, email and payment providers operate data centres outside Nigeria, so your personal data is transferred to and stored in other countries.

The NDPA permits this where the data remains adequately protected. We rely on the contractual data protection terms each provider offers — including standard contractual clauses and their own certifications — and we choose established providers with published security practices for exactly this reason. As in section 8, you can ask us which provider holds a particular kind of data, and where, at support@baeja.ng.

We keep personal data only as long as it is doing a job. Concretely:

Baejá decides in what order to show you people, using your preferences, distance, shared interests and values, verification status, and internal signals about how members are responding to a profile — including one score we keep private, because publishing it would invite gaming and would be unkind to read about yourself. It affects the order of a deck. It is never shown to you or to anyone else, and it is never exposed by our apps.

This is ranking, not judgement. No automated decision is made about you that has a legal effect or otherwise significantly affects you. Decisions that matter — verification approval, warnings, suspensions and bans — are reviewed by a person before they take effect. If one of those decisions goes against you, you can ask us to look again by writing to support@baeja.ng.

We also screen voice notes and photos for content that breaks our rules. Where something is flagged, a human moderator makes the call.

As a data subject under the NDPA 2023, you have the right to:

• Be informed — which is what this policy is for.
• Access a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Correct anything inaccurate. Most of your profile you can edit yourself, right now, from your profile page.
• Delete your account and personal data — see section 13.
• Restrict or object to processing we base on legitimate interest.
• Withdraw consent at any time, where consent is our basis — by clearing an optional field, by declining advertising storage, or by asking us.
• Portability — receive your data in a structured, commonly used format.
• Complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission — see section 17.

To exercise any of these, email support@baeja.ng or use our contact form. We will respond within 30 days. Exercising a right is free, and we will never penalise you for it. We may need to confirm you are who you say you are before we act — that protects you, not us.

You can have your account and personal data deleted at any time. Email support@baeja.ng from the address on your account, or send us a request through the app's support page, and we will action it.

When we delete an account we permanently remove:

• your sign-in credentials, so the account can never be used again;
• your profile, including your bio, values, preferences and location;
• every photo and voice note you uploaded, and any verification media;
• your verification record;
• your likes, and every match together with all of its messages and games;
• your notifications, device tokens and support tickets;
• your cached entries, including your card in other members' decks.

Two things deliberately survive, and we would rather tell you than surprise you:

• Transaction records, because we are required to keep a financial trail that our payment providers can be reconciled against.
• Abuse reports made about the account, plus a short deletion audit line. If we removed an account for scamming or abuse, discarding the record would let the same person return unrecognised. This protects other members.

Deleting your account does not remove messages you sent from the device or memory of the person who received them.

• Everything travels over encrypted connections, and is encrypted at rest by our database and storage providers.
• Passwords are never stored by us in a readable form — our authentication provider keeps only a salted hash.
• Photos, voice notes and verification media sit in private storage with no public URLs. Each request is checked against who you are and whether you are entitled to that specific file.
• Database rules block direct access from the outside: members can read their own matches and messages and nothing else, and cannot write to them directly — everything goes through our API, which checks first.
• Staff access is limited by role, and administrative actions are recorded against the person who took them.
• Sensitive routes are rate-limited to blunt credential stuffing and scraping.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever puts your rights at risk we will notify the Nigeria Data Protection Commission and the members affected, as the NDPA requires. Your own part matters too: use a password you use nowhere else, and tell us at support@baeja.ng if you think someone else is in your account.

Baejá is strictly for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account, and we enforce a minimum age of 18 at signup. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

If you believe a minor has an account, report the profile in the app or write to support@baeja.ng immediately. We will investigate and, where it is confirmed, remove the account and its data.

We will update this policy as Baejá changes. The effective date at the top always tells you which version you are reading. When a change materially affects your rights or how we use your data we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, rather than quietly editing this page.

For anything about your data — including access and deletion requests — and for everything else besides: support@baeja.ng. It is the only address we use, so nothing gets lost between inboxes.

If we have not resolved your concern, you have the right to complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC), the supervisory authority for the NDPA 2023, at ndpc.gov.ng. We would rather you came to us first, and we will take you seriously if you do.