Privacy Policy

Who this policy covers

SafeGuard GH runs a public registry for missing-person reports and a companion service, GMIRS, for lost and found Ghana Card, Voter ID, passport, DVLA licence and NHIS cards. This policy covers anyone who submits a case, browses the public registry, applies to be a guardian, sends a tip, or gives to the Fund. It does not cover the internal case-review console used by SafeGuard staff and case officers, which sits behind a separate login and its own access controls, described briefly under “Cookies” below and fully in our staff data-handling procedures.

What we collect, and why

Missing-person reports

The person filing a report, a relative, a guardian, or an officer on someone’s behalf, gives us the subject’s name, approximate age and gender, a photo if one is available, and the circumstances of the case: region, town, district, a landmark, and when and where the person was last seen. We also record the reporter’s own name, phone number and relationship to the subject, so a case officer can reach them.

Found-ID and lost-card reports (GMIRS)

A finder tells us the card type and region and where they left it. A card number is never stored in full on either side, we mask all but a handful of digits so a genuine owner can recognise their own card without the number being readable by anyone else.

Guardian applications

Guardians are the volunteers who watch for approved alerts in their own community. To apply, we ask for a name, a Ghana Card number, a phone number, region and district, a language preference, and three separate acknowledgements: that you consent to processing, that you understand guardianship is unpaid, and that you consent to a Ghana Card check. We do not ask for a home address, date of birth, photo, employer, or next of kin. If a field isn’t on the form, it’s because we decided we didn’t need it, not because we forgot.

Tips

A tip can be submitted anonymously. Your name and contact details are entirely optional; we only ask for a description and, if you choose to give it, a location. A tip goes to the officer queue handling that case. It is never forwarded to the family who filed the report.

Donations

To give to the Fund, we ask for an amount and, if you want your gift linked to it, a specific case. We do not collect card numbers on our own servers; payment is handled by Paystack, a licensed payment processor, on a page it controls. Anything Paystack passes back to us after a successful payment (typically a display name, if you chose to give one) is stored to reconcile the transaction. We never publish donor names or individual amounts.

Consent, and how a photo becomes public

Filing a case records your consent as a set of separate, specific choices rather than one blanket agreement: consent for us to process the report at all, consent for a case officer to publish an alert about it, and, for adult subjects, the subject’s own consent or a documented officer review in place of it, reporting an adult without either is not permitted on this platform.

A photo is treated as its own decision, separate from publishing the alert itself. It is only ever shown publicly when both the publish consent and a further, explicit consent to share more widely are on file, and a case officer has confirmed that in writing on the case. In practice this means the large majority of alerts carry a written summary and no photo at all, that is the conservative default, not an oversight.

What a case officer reviews before anything goes public

No report reaches the public registry untouched. A case officer reads it, writes or edits a public-safe summary, and only then publishes it. What the public registry shows is fixed and deliberately narrow:

• Region, town, district and a landmark, never an exact address or GPS coordinate.
• A reviewed summary, written or approved by a case officer, not the raw text a reporter submitted.
• The date the person was last seen, not a live location.
• A photo, only under the two-consent rule described above.

What it never shows: the reporter’s name, phone number or email; the subject’s full identifying details or any document number; or precise coordinates of any kind. A found-card alert on the registry shows only the card type, region, landmark and a fixed notice that owner details are private, never the owner’s or finder’s name.

How we protect what we hold

• Ghana Card numbers submitted by guardians are converted to a one-way cryptographic hash before storage; only the last four digits are kept in a readable form, for the guardian to recognise their own record.
• Phone numbers used for broadcast alerts are hashed the same way.
• Staff and officer passwords are stored using industry-standard salted hashing, never in plain text.
• Access to case detail, reporter contact information, and subject identity is restricted to case officers and staff holding the relevant role, not the whole SafeGuard team.
• Traffic to and from the platform is encrypted in transit.

How long we keep it

We retain case, tip and guardian records for up to 365 days from the date they were filed or last updated. Records past that window are reviewed for deletion. Some records, for example a completed handover or a closed case a family has asked us to keep for their own reference, may be retained longer at the person’s request. Donation transaction records are kept as long as reasonably necessary for financial reconciliation and reporting.

Who we share it with

We do not sell personal data, and we do not run advertising on this platform. Data is shared only where the platform’s own function requires it: with the case officer assigned to a report, with Paystack to process a donation you initiate, and with government agencies or partner institutions only under a documented agreement and only for the specific purpose that agreement covers, for example confirming a found card’s owner. Where a partnership or data-sharing arrangement is not yet formally in place, the corresponding feature on this platform is either disabled or run manually by a case officer rather than shared automatically.

Your rights

You can ask us at any time to tell you what we hold about you, correct it if it’s wrong, or delete it, including withdrawing a consent you gave earlier, such as publish or amplification consent on a case you reported. Withdrawing publish consent on an active case takes the public alert down; it does not affect the officer’s own record of the case. Write to us using the contact details below, and if you are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to raise a complaint with Ghana’s Data Protection Commission.

Reports involving children

Most missing-person reports on this platform concern children, and we treat that seriously rather than as a routine detail. A child’s case is reviewed by a case officer before publication in every case, with no exception for urgency. We do not require a child’s own consent to file a report on their behalf, but we do require an officer’s review before any part of it becomes public.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or how long we keep it, we will update the date at the top of this page and, for a material change, say so on the homepage for a reasonable period before it takes effect.