Privacy and your memories

Updated 9 September 2026

Who we are

Hamanteh, Half Die Oral History, is a community archive run by Dundal Systems based in The Gambia. We record and preserve the oral histories of families in Half Die.

Community accounts

When you use an available Google, Facebook or X sign-in, we keep the provider account identifier and your display name so you can return to the same account. Google also supplies a verified email address. Facebook and X sign-in do not request your email here. We do not receive your provider password or retain provider access tokens. Connecting another provider requires an explicit action while signed in. Public accounts never grant staff access.

What we collect

Submissions you provide: family name, neighbourhood, story text, photos, audio recordings, the names + roles of people in your story, your contact details (email, phone) if you share them.
Consent and review records: the permissions you choose and the care team's review decisions.
My Corner: your follows, notifications, review messages and email preferences. These are not a public activity feed.
Analytics: public pages use Dundal Analytics to help us understand use of the archive. Account, recognition-desk and staff routes are excluded from that pageview integration. Operational and security records are separate.

What we do with it

Recordings, transcripts, and family entries are made public on this site only with explicit consent (the public archive permission at submission).
New community contributions and clues remain private to their author and staff until approved for publication.
If you explicitly allow AI assistance on an upload, staff may send that image or audio to OpenAI for a draft description or transcription. Drafts stay private for human review and are not verified evidence. Photo assistance is instructed not to identify faces or infer sensitive personal traits. This permission is not permission to add your upload to a training corpus.
Your contact details are used to follow up on your submission and never shared.
We do not sell, rent, or trade any personal information.

Your rights

Access: ask us for a copy of everything we hold about your family.
Correction: ask us to fix wrong information.
Removal: ask us to remove an entry from public view. You can immediately withdraw your own community contribution from its page.
Withdraw consent: revoke any optional consent you previously gave (e.g., remove from AI corpus while keeping the public entry).

Retention and email

Archival material is intended for long-term preservation. Withdrawal from public view is not immediate deletion from every backup or source copy. Ask us about a particular record so we can explain what remains and why. Weekly email is optional and requires a verified contact address. Turn it off in My Corner or use the unsubscribe link in an email. Emails link to your account rather than including private contribution text.

Where data lives

The hosted archive uses DigitalOcean infrastructure. Audio originals also exist in the project's source Google Drive folder.

Delete your account or data

To request deletion of your Hamanteh account and associated personal data, email [email protected] with the subject “Hamanteh data deletion request”. Include your Hamanteh display name, sign-in provider and any contribution links you want removed. Do not send passwords, access tokens or an identity document.

We will confirm account ownership through a safe follow-up before removing someone's data. Tell us whether you want public contributions withdrawn too. We will explain the action taken and any records that must be retained for security, consent or legal reasons. Removing Hamanteh from Facebook or another provider disconnects that provider permission; it does not itself delete material already submitted here.

For corrections, an access request, a family concern or a photograph of you that should not be public, contact the same address with its link.