Last updated: 31 August 2026
You came here because you want to know what happens to your information when you use this site. That is a fair question. It deserves a plain answer, so this page gives one.
SEVICS Africa runs sevics.africa. We are a nonprofit. We research and document African cultural heritage, and we build tools that help people understand the objects their families and communities have kept for generations. Some of those tools collect information. What follows is all of it.
Who to write to
If you have a question about anything on this page, write to us at [your contact email]. If you want your information removed, that is the same address. Tell us what you want removed and we will remove it.
The mask identifier
This is the part people ask about most, so it comes first.
When you upload a photograph to the mask identifier, three things happen.
Your photograph goes to Google. Google run the Gemini model that reads the image and proposes what the object might be. This means your photograph leaves our server and reaches theirs. What Google do with it is governed by their own terms, not ours. If you are not comfortable with that, do not upload the photograph.
We keep the answer, not the picture. When the description comes back we store that description for seven days, so the same photograph does not have to be sent twice. The photograph itself is never saved to this site. It is not added to our database. It is not published. Nobody else sees it.
We count how often the tool is used. One person should not be able to run up our costs and lock everyone else out. So we take your IP address, scramble it into a code that cannot be turned back into an address, and keep a count against that code for one hour. Your actual IP address is never written down.
One request. The identifier is built for objects. Do not upload a photograph of a person.
The newsletter
If you join our mailing list we keep your email address, and your name if you give one. We use it to send you what you asked for and nothing else. We do not sell it. We do not rent it. We do not hand it to anybody.
Every email we send carries a link at the bottom that takes you off the list, and it works straight away. You can also write to us and we will take you off by hand.
When you write to us
The forms on this site send us your name, your email address and your message. That is all they send. We keep the message so we can answer it, and so we can find it again if you write to us later about the same thing.
Comments
If you leave a comment on an article we keep the comment, the name and email address you gave, and the time you left it. The comment is public. Your email address is not.
What we measure
We use Google Analytics and Google Search Console, connected through Site Kit. They tell us which pages people read, roughly where in the world our readers are, and what people searched for before they arrived. We read this to decide what to write next.
We do not use it to work out who you are. We could not do so if we wanted to.
Advertising
This site carries advertising through Google AdSense. Google use cookies to decide which advertisements you see. You can control that yourself in your Google account under Ads Settings. We do not choose the individual advertisements, and we do not receive personal information about you from them.
Cookies
A cookie is a small file that a website leaves in your browser so it can recognise that browser again later. This site uses them for three things: keeping the site fast, measuring what people read, and serving advertising.
When you first arrive you are asked which of these you accept. That choice belongs to you, and so does changing it. The banner is run by CookieYes and you can open it again at any time.
Server records
Like every website, our host records the requests that come in. That record includes IP addresses, browser types and the pages asked for. It exists so the site can be kept running and defended when somebody attacks it. We do not use it for anything else.
Your rights
Wherever you live, you can ask us what we hold about you. You can ask us to correct it. You can ask us to delete it. You can tell us to stop sending you things.
If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, the law already gives you these rights. We extend them to everybody else as well, because the right thing to do does not change at a border.
Write to [your contact email]. We answer within thirty days and usually much sooner.
Children
This site is not built for children under sixteen, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we will remove it.
What we do not do
We do not sell your information. We do not trade it. We have never done it and we are not going to start.
When this page changes
When we change how this site handles information, we change this page and we change the date at the top. If the change matters, we will say so openly rather than quietly amending the wording and hoping nobody notices.