Privacy Policy

Nothing personal. The Atlas has no accounts, no sign-in, no comments and no advertising. We do not ask for, store or transmit your name, email address, contacts, location, photos or any other personal data.

The one exception is the optional donation form on the website. If you choose to give, you enter an email address so that Paystack can send you a receipt. That address goes directly to Paystack and is never stored by us: the Atlas is a set of static files with no server and no database to store it in. We never see your card, phone number or payment details at any point.

The Android app requests a single permission, Internet access, which it uses only to load imagery as described below. It does not access your camera, microphone, storage, contacts or location.

Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. Photographs shown on community, monument, hero and food pages are fetched directly from Wikimedia servers when a page is opened. Like any web request, this reveals your IP address and general device information to the Wikimedia Foundation, whose handling of that data is described in the Wikimedia privacy policy. We receive nothing back from Wikimedia about you.

Website hosting and analytics (website only). The website is served by Vercel and uses Vercel Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies and without identifying individual visitors. This analytics script is not included in the Android app.

Paystack (website only, only if you donate). Donations are handled by Paystack, which is also the only third-party script the site can load beyond analytics. It is fetched on demand, the moment you open the donation form, so readers who never donate are never served it at all. What you enter there is processed by Paystack under its own privacy policy. The Android app contains no donation feature and never contacts Paystack.

The Android app bundles the whole encyclopedia inside the app so it works without a connection except for imagery. The only thing written to your device beyond the app itself is the ordinary browser cache used to avoid re-downloading images. Uninstalling the app removes it. No identifiers are created or stored.

The Atlas is an educational reference intended for a general audience aged 13 and over, and is not directed at children under 13. Some documentary material covers warfare, initiation rites and traditional dress. We do not knowingly collect any information from anyone, including children.

If the way the Atlas handles data ever changes, for example if a future version adds accounts or search hosted on our own servers, this page will be updated first and the date above will change.

Questions or corrections: write to the developer contact address shown on the app's Google Play listing, or see the About & Methodology page for how the Atlas is built and sourced.