Privacy Policy

Bitsmiths Solutions (“Bitsmiths,” “we,” “us”) builds enterprise software for governments, enterprises and growing businesses, based in Lusaka, Zambia. This policy explains what information bitsmiths.net collects, why, and what rights you have over it. It applies to this website and the contact and newsletter forms on it, not to any client system we build, which is governed by that client’s own terms.

Information you give us directly

We collect information only when you choose to provide it:

• Contact form. Your name, email address, what your enquiry is about, and your message. We use this solely to respond to you.
• Newsletter signup. Your name and email address, used to send the updates you signed up for and nothing else.

We don’t require an account to use this site, and we don’t collect payment information here: there’s nothing to buy on bitsmiths.net.

Information collected automatically

We use Penda, our own self-hosted analytics (built on Umami, an open-source, privacy-focused analytics platform) to understand aggregate traffic: which pages get visited, roughly how people find the site, general device and location trends. Penda doesn’t use cookies, doesn’t assign you a persistent identifier, doesn’t track you across other websites, and doesn’t give us any way to identify who you are individually from it. We only ever see numbers in aggregate, not a profile of any one visitor.

When you submit the contact or newsletter form, we use Cloudflare Turnstile to confirm you’re not a bot before the submission goes through. Turnstile may process some technical information (like your browser and network characteristics) to do that; it’s governed by Cloudflare’s own privacy policy, and we don’t receive anything from it beyond a yes/no verification.

How we use your information

• To reply to a message you’ve sent us through the contact form.
• To send the newsletter you signed up for, if you signed up for it.
• To keep the site secure and prevent spam or abuse of the forms.
• To understand, in aggregate, how the site is used, so we can improve it.

We don’t use your information for advertising, we don’t build profiles of visitors, and we don’t sell or rent personal information to anyone, ever.

Who we share it with

We don’t sell or share your information for marketing purposes. A small number of service providers process it on our behalf, strictly to make the site and forms work:

• Cloudflare. Hosts the infrastructure behind our contact and newsletter forms (Workers, D1 database, Turnstile bot protection, and email delivery routing).
• Amazon Web Services (SES). Delivers the transactional emails these forms trigger (your confirmation, our internal notification).

We may also disclose information if required to by law, or to protect the rights, property or safety of Bitsmiths or others.

Cookies & tracking

This site doesn’t use tracking or advertising cookies. Penda, our analytics, is cookieless by design. The only cookies bitsmiths.net may set are Cloudflare Turnstile’s, which exist solely to verify form submissions aren’t automated; these are strictly necessary for the forms to work securely, not used for tracking or advertising, and don’t require a consent banner under GDPR, UK GDPR or Zambia’s Data Protection Act, all of which exempt cookies that are essential to a service you’ve actively requested (submitting a form).

How long we keep it

We keep contact form submissions and newsletter subscriber records for as long as needed to respond to your enquiry or maintain your subscription, or until you ask us to delete them, whichever comes first. Aggregate analytics data isn’t tied to an individual, so there’s nothing personal in it to separately delete.

Your rights

Depending on where you’re located, you may have the right to access, correct, or delete the personal information we hold about you, object to how we use it, or ask for a copy of it. To exercise any of these, email us at info[at]bitsmiths[dot]net and we’ll respond directly; there’s no automated process to route this through. Unsubscribing from the newsletter is also available directly from any newsletter email.

International visitors

Bitsmiths is based in Zambia, and this policy is written to meet Zambia’s Data Protection Act No. 3 of 2021. If you’re visiting from the EU, UK or elsewhere with its own data protection law, the practices above (minimal collection, no tracking cookies, no profiling, no sale of data) are intended to meet those standards as well. Our processors (Cloudflare, AWS) maintain their own cross-border transfer safeguards under their respective compliance programs.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or how we use it, we’ll update this page and the date at the top. We won’t make material changes that reduce your rights without making that change clearly visible here.

Contact us

Questions about this policy or your information: email info[at]bitsmiths[dot]net, or write to us at 6th Floor, ZEP-RE Business Park, Alick Nkhata Road, Mass Media, Lusaka, Zambia.