Privacy Policy

Guneku Fondom is a traditional institution in Mbengwi, Momo Division, North West Region, Cameroon. guneku.org is the Fondom’s official website: a public record of the Fondom, its Palace, its quarters, its institutions and its people at home and in the diaspora. The site is maintained on the Fondom’s behalf by MaxPromo Digital.

In this policy, “we” means Guneku Fondom, acting through the Palace and those who maintain the site for it. If you want to ask anything about this page, write to info@guneku.org or use the contact page.

You can read every public page of this site — the Fondom, the Palace, the quarters, the registers, the news, the galleries and the films — without an account, without signing in, and without telling us who you are. This is built into the site rather than promised by it: only the member area, the moderation queues and a small number of member-only endpoints ever look for a session at all.

An account exists so that a villager can take part — keep an entry in the indigenes register, claim an existing entry as their own, follow a project, put something forward for the record. It is never needed to read.

Almost everything here is something you choose to type and send.

• Writing to the Palace. Through the contact form or the “Talk to the Palace” message, you give your name, a topic or subject, your message, and an email address or a telephone number so the Palace can reply. You are asked to confirm that we may use those details to answer you.
• Offering support. On the support page you give your name, which project you are interested in, how you would like to help, an optional message, and an email address or telephone number.
• Putting a name forward for the directory. You give details about the person being put forward and a way to reach you about the submission.
• Asking the assistant. If you use Ask Guneku, the question you type is sent to our assistant provider so an answer can be produced. Do not put anything confidential into it.
• Keeping a member profile. If you sign in and build an entry in the indigenes register, you choose what to fill in: a name and display name, a photograph and cover image, city and country, profession and employer, a short biography, your quarter, family lineage and family home, your generation, the year you left Guneku, and links to your own website or social accounts.
• Taking part as a member. Claiming an entry, putting a contribution forward for the record, following a project or a quarter, and corresponding with the Palace as a signed-in member each store what you submitted, when, and its status as it is reviewed.

Please do not send us other people’s personal details through these forms unless you have a good reason and their agreement.

Member accounts are handled for us by Clerk. When you create an account or sign in, Clerk verifies your identity and manages your session. We do not see or store your password.

Where signing in with Google is offered, choosing it means Google confirms your identity to Clerk and passes on the basic account details you approve — typically your name and email address. We never receive your Google password, and we do not gain access to anything else in your Google account.

What the Fondom’s own database stores about your account is deliberately small: an identifier issued by Clerk, so that your profile, your claims, your contributions and what you follow can be recognised as yours, along with a display name, an email address, and your country, quarter or chapter where you have given them.

• Your network address, for rate limiting. When you submit a form or ask the assistant, the site counts recent requests from your address so that no one can flood the Palace inbox or run up the Fondom’s costs. These counts are held in the memory of the running server, are not written to the database, and are lost whenever the site is redeployed or the server restarts.
• The human check. Public forms may show a Cloudflare Turnstile challenge to tell a person from an automated script. Cloudflare receives what it needs to decide that and returns a pass or a fail. The result is all we act on.
• Audience and performance measurement. The site uses Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights to count page views and measure how quickly pages load. This is aggregate measurement — it is not used to build a profile of you, and it does not use cookies to identify you.
• Server logs. Our hosting keeps ordinary technical records of requests and errors, which is how faults get found and fixed.

This site sets no advertising and no tracking cookies, and it does not sell or share data with advertising networks.

The one cookie that matters is the sign-in session cookie set by Clerk when you sign in, which is what keeps you signed in as you move between member pages. If you never sign in, you never receive it. The site stores nothing else in your browser for its own purposes.

• To read, answer and keep track of correspondence sent to the Palace.
• To respond to an offer of support and to discuss a project with you.
• To consider a name put forward for the indigenes register.
• To show your entry in the register, as you have chosen to show it.
• To review claims and contributions, so that what enters the Fondom’s record has been checked by a person.
• To keep the site working, to keep it secure, and to prevent abuse.
• To understand, in aggregate, which parts of the record people use.

We do not sell your information. We do not use it for advertising. We do not use what you send the Palace as material for anything other than answering you and keeping the Palace’s own record of the correspondence.

This distinction matters more here than almost anywhere else on the site, so it is worth being exact.

Public — visible to anyone on the internet:

• The entry you build in the indigenes register, if it is marked as publicly visible. This is the point of the register, and a profile is publicly visible by default — you can change that yourself at any time from your profile page.
• Any photograph or cover image you upload. Images are stored with our hosting provider and served from a public web address. The address is not guessable, but it is not protected: anybody who has the link can open the image, and it may stay reachable after you replace it. Please do not upload anything you would not put on a public noticeboard.
• Anything of yours that the Palace reviews and publishes into the record.

Not public — seen by the Palace and those who help it:

• Everything you write through the contact form, the Palace message, a support offer or a directory submission, together with the email address or telephone number you gave for a reply.
• Your email address and telephone number generally. These are not displayed on your public entry.
• Your community member record, which starts not publicly visible, does not show your quarter unless you ask it to, and does not mark you as contactable unless you choose that.
• A claim or a contribution while it is being reviewed, and the reviewer’s notes on it.

The site is built on services that process information on our behalf. These are the ones actually in use:

• Vercel — hosting, image and file storage, audience and performance measurement.
• Clerk — member accounts, sign-in and sessions.
• Neon — the database holding profiles, claims, contributions, follows and Palace correspondence.
• Resend — delivering form submissions and notifications by email.
• Cloudflare — the Turnstile human check on public forms.
• Anthropic — producing answers for the Ask Guneku assistant.
• Google — only where you choose to sign in with a Google account.

Each is used for that purpose and no other. We may also disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect the Fondom, the site or the people who use it.

Guneku is in Cameroon and its community is spread across many countries. The services listed above operate internationally, so information you send through this site is likely to be processed on servers outside Cameroon, including in Europe and the United States. If that matters to you, the contact page and the Palace telephone number remain open to you and neither goes through this website.

We will be plain rather than precise here, because inventing a timetable we do not operate would be worse than admitting we have not set one.

• Correspondence with the Palace is kept while it is being handled and afterwards as part of the Palace’s own record of who wrote and what was answered.
• Your member profile is kept for as long as you keep it. You can change or clear its fields yourself, and clearing a field removes that value.
• Claims and contributions are kept with their outcome, so that the record shows how something entered it and who checked it.
• Rate-limiting counts are not retained at all, as described above.

We have not set fixed deletion periods for the categories above. If you want something removed, ask us and we will deal with it.

Pages are served over an encrypted connection. Member actions are checked on the server, not merely hidden in the browser, and a member can only reach their own records. Moderation pages check the reviewer’s role on the server before showing anything. Public forms carry a hidden trap for automated submissions, a rate limit, and the human check. Keys and secrets stay on the server and are never sent to your browser.

No website can promise perfect security, and we do not. If you believe something about this site is unsafe, please tell us at info@guneku.org before telling anyone else, and we will act on it.

Some of this you can do yourself, signed in:

• Edit any field of your profile, or clear it.
• Change whether your entry is publicly visible.
• Change whether you are shown as open to connect or willing to mentor.
• Withdraw a claim or a contribution you have put forward.
• Stop following a project, a quarter or a topic.

For anything else — a copy of what we hold about you, a correction, removal of your entry or of correspondence, or a question about any of this — write to info@guneku.org. Tell us what you are asking for and how to recognise your records. There is no automated account-deletion button on this site; removal is done by asking us, and we will confirm when it is done.

Depending on where you live, local law may give you further rights over your information. We will honour a reasonable request of that kind whether or not a particular law applies to us.

The Guneku record is written for the whole community and is open to any reader, including children. Member accounts, however, are meant for adults and for older young people acting with their family’s knowledge, and we do not set out to collect information from young children.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has given us information through this site, write to info@guneku.org and we will remove it.

The site changes as the Fondom builds it, and this page changes with it. When it does, the date at the top changes too. If a change materially affects what happens to information you have already given us, we will say so on the site rather than leave you to notice.

Guneku Fondom — The Palace, Guneku, Mbengwi, Momo Division, North West Region, Cameroon.

Email info@guneku.org, or use the contact page, where the Palace telephone number is also published. See also our Terms of Service.