Privacy notice

Last updated 12 August 2026

Who we are

To be confirmedThe registered name and address of the organisation responsible for this data is being confirmed and will be named here. In the meantime, any question about your data can be sent to byte@techaiexpo.com and it will reach the right person.

This notice covers techaiexpo.co and the services run on it: award nominations, public voting, hackathon registration, exhibition stand booking and event check-in.

It does not cover ticket purchases. Tickets are sold through a separate ticketing platform with its own privacy notice, and your card details are never handled by this website.

What we collect

If you submit an award nomination

About the nominee: name, organisation, country, a short biography, and an email address if you provide one.
About you: your name, email address, phone number, and your relationship to the nominee.
Your written case and any links you supply as evidence.
The IP address the submission came from, used only to detect abuse.

If you register a hackathon team

For every team member: name, email address, phone number if given, country, role, and whether they are the team lead.
Whether at least one member is African, because that is an eligibility rule for the competition.
Your team name, chosen track, and idea submission.
The IP address the registration came from.

If you vote in the awards

Your phone number, used to send a one-time code and confirm you are a real person voting once.
We do not store your phone number in a readable form. It is converted into an irreversible fingerprint and only that is kept. It lets us tell that a number has already voted in a category, and it cannot be turned back into your number.
A record that a vote was cast, for audit purposes. Running totals are not published until voting closes.

If you exhibit or sponsor

Your company details, the contact people you nominate, your stand or package selection, and billing information.

If you attend

At check-in we scan your ticket, and if you use an event badge card we record its identifier against your ticket. This produces a record of which zones you entered and when, used for capacity management and attendance reporting.

Everyone

Standard server logs: IP address, browser type, the pages requested and when. Passwords, tokens, one-time codes, phone numbers and API keys are stripped from logs automatically before they are written.

Why we collect it

To run the thing you asked us to run: your nomination, your team registration, your vote, your stand booking, your admission to the venue.
To contact you about it, including telling you the outcome.
To keep the awards honest. The one-vote-per-category rule cannot be enforced without some way of recognising a repeat vote.
To prevent abuse, which is the only reason IP addresses are kept.
To report on attendance, in aggregate, to the organizers, sponsors and exhibitors.

We do not sell your data and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. It is shared only with:

The event organizers, who need it to run the event.
The awards judging panel, who see nominations in order to screen and shortlist them.
Our email provider, to send you messages about your submission.
Our SMS providers, to deliver one-time voting codes. International numbers are routed through a different provider than Tanzanian ones.
Our ticketing platform, where ticket purchases and complimentary ticket issuance happen.
Anyone we are legally required to disclose to.

Some of these providers operate outside Tanzania, which means your data may be processed abroad.

What becomes public

Shortlisted nominees are published. If someone you nominate is shortlisted, their name, organisation and country appear on the public ballot.
Your identity as a nominator is never published. It is not shown on the ballot and is not disclosed to the nominee.
Team names and tracks are published for the hackathon. Team members' contact details are not.
Individual votes are never published, and neither is anything that could identify who voted for whom.

How long we keep it

Nomination and hackathon entries: kept for the duration of the 2026 event cycle and a reasonable period afterwards for reporting and disputes.
Voting records: the audit log is kept long enough for the result to be verified and challenged, then reduced to aggregate totals.
Check-in records: reduced to aggregate attendance figures after the event.
Server logs: kept for a short operational period, then deleted.
Financial records for stands and sponsorship: kept as long as tax and accounting law requires.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

Tell you what we hold about you.
Correct anything that is wrong.
Delete it, where we are not required to keep it.
Stop sending you messages that are not about something you submitted.
Withdraw a nomination you submitted.

Email byte@techaiexpo.com and say what you want. We may ask you to confirm your identity first, so we do not act on someone else's request about your data.

One thing we cannot do is retrieve or delete an individual vote. Because phone numbers are stored as irreversible fingerprints and votes are deliberately not linked to identities, there is no way to find yours. That is a consequence of the ballot being secret, not an oversight.

How it is protected

Traffic to this site is encrypted in transit.
Phone numbers used for voting are stored only as irreversible fingerprints.
Sensitive values are stripped from application logs automatically.
Administrative access is restricted to named people who need it.
Data is backed up, and the backups are restricted in the same way.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects you and the law requires us to tell you, we will.

Children

This site is not aimed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has submitted information, tell us and we will remove it.

Cookies and analytics

This site does not set advertising or tracking cookies. Anything strictly necessary to keep you signed in during a session is used only for that.

We measure how the site is used with a privacy-preserving analytics service that sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device, and creates no identifier that follows you between visits or across other websites. It counts page views, referrers, and broad information such as country and device type. None of it identifies you, and none of it is combined with anything you submit through a form. That is why you are not asked to accept cookies here: there are none to accept.

If your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, analytics does not load at all. If we ever add tracking that does set cookies, this section will be updated and you will be asked before anything non-essential is set.

Changes to this notice

We will update this page if what we collect or how we use it changes, and the date at the top will change with it.

Contact

Questions about any of this go to byte@techaiexpo.com. See also our terms and conditions and refund policy.