Privacy Policy

Mukoko News is a news aggregator operated by Nyuchi Africa. This policy explains what we collect when you use the website, the installed app or our APIs, and what we do with it.

It does not cover the publishers we link to. When you follow a link to an article you are on their site, under their policy, and they may collect things we do not.

Your country and category preferences, the sidebar and appearance settings, and — if you grant location access for the weather strip — your last coarse position are stored in your browser’s local storage. They are not sent to us and we cannot read them. Clearing your browser data removes them.

Because they are per-browser, these settings do not follow you to another device. That is a limitation, not a feature, and it is the honest trade for not holding them.

If you are signed out

Nothing, until you interact. The first time you like, save or open an article we set a single cookie, mukoko_session, containing a random identifier and nothing else. It is HttpOnly and SameSite=Strict, so it cannot be read by scripts and is never sent to another site. It exists so that your saved articles are still there when you come back, and it is the only cookie we set.

If you are signed in

Accounts are handled by WorkOS. We hold the profile record it creates — your name, username, profile picture and any interests you choose — plus your saved articles, likes and the preferences you set from your profile. Your likes and saves move from the cookie to your account the first time you interact while signed in, so your history follows you between devices.

Operationally

We record article view, like and save counts against that identifier. We apply rate limits by IP address to keep the service up. We receive browser-reported security policy violations. Server logs from our hosting providers contain the usual request metadata for a short period.

We do not build an advertising profile, we do not track you across other websites, and we have no relationship with any data broker.

Publisher photographs and site icons are not loaded into your browser from the publisher’s servers. They are fetched by our own image service and cached there, so your IP address, browser details and referring page are never handed to a third-party image host just because you scrolled past a headline.

One consequence worth stating plainly: it means we see the image requests instead. We use them to serve and cache the image, and for nothing else.

The date and weather strip in the header can show conditions where you are. It never asks on page load — it checks whether you have already granted location access to this site and, if you have not, shows a “Use my location” control and waits for you to press it.

If you do grant it, your coordinates are rounded to roughly a kilometre before they leave your device, and sent to our sibling weather service to resolve conditions. Weather does not vary street by street, and a precise fix is your home address. If you decline, the service falls back to an approximate location derived from your IP address, which is frequently wrong on a mobile network and is only ever used to pick a forecast.

We use automated tools, including machine-learning models, to categorise articles, extract keywords and named entities, estimate sentiment, generate short summaries and build embeddings for search. These run over published news content — the articles we aggregate — and not over your account, your reading history or anything you have saved.

We do not use your personal data to train AI models, and we do not pass it to model providers.

These providers run parts of the platform on our behalf:

• Vercel — hosting and delivery of the website
• MongoDB Atlas — the database holding articles, accounts and engagement records
• Cloudflare — our API gateway, the image service, and the gateway that routes automated content processing
• Fly.io — the background service that collects articles from publisher feeds
• WorkOS — sign-in and account identity
• Upstash — rate-limit counters, where configured

Preferences live on your device until you clear them. The anonymous session cookie lasts a year unless you delete it. Account data is kept while your account exists.

To see, correct or delete what we hold about you, or to close your account, write to [email protected]. Depending on where you live you may have additional rights over your data; we will honour a request whether or not a law compels us to.

Mukoko News is a general news service and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13.

We may update this policy. The date at the top always reflects the current version, and we will ask you to accept again where a change is material. See also our Terms of Service.

Privacy questions or requests: [email protected].