Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated: April 2026 · Effective: 1 May 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how NigeriaPolls (“we,” “us,” “our”) collects, uses, shares and protects your personal data when you visit our website, vote in polls, subscribe to our newsletter, take part in a telephone or in-person interview, or interact with us via SMS or WhatsApp. We comply with the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023 and the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR), 2019 issued by the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC).

1. What we collect

• Phone number (when you vote via SMS, take part in a survey by telephone or WhatsApp, or join the panel)
• Email address (when you subscribe to the Insight Brief)
• Demographic data you voluntarily provide (age band, gender, state, education) for weighting and statistical analysis
• Anonymous engagement data (poll choices, time on page, referrer) collected via privacy-respecting analytics
• IP address & user agent for fraud prevention and rate limiting

We do not collect: full name (unless you give it), national identification numbers (NIN/BVN), home address, payment data, or biometrics.

2. How we use your data

• Aggregate poll responses into anonymized national/state-level statistics
• Weight survey results to be representative of Nigeria's adult population
• Send you the Weekly Pulse newsletter (only if you double-opted in)
• Send vote confirmations and pulse-cycle invitations via SMS or WhatsApp, and invite panellists to take part in surveys by telephone
• Detect duplicate or fraudulent voting

We never sell, rent, or trade your personal data. Aggregate, anonymized statistics published under CC BY 4.0 contain no personal identifiers.

3. Lawful basis (NDPR)

We process your data on the following lawful bases under Section 25 of the NDPA 2023:

• Consent for newsletter subscriptions, panel membership, and contact by SMS, WhatsApp or telephone
• Legitimate interest for anonymous analytics and fraud prevention
• Public interest for the publication of aggregate, anonymized public-opinion research

4. Your rights

Under the NDPA 2023 you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you
• Request correction or deletion (“right to be forgotten”)
• Object to or restrict processing
• Withdraw consent at any time
• Lodge a complaint with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC)

To exercise these rights, use our data request form. It logs your request straight away and sends you a reference, and we respond within 30 days. You can also email [email protected] or text STOP to our SMS shortcode. You can ask to be removed from telephone contact at any point, including during a call, and we will add you to our do-not-contact list immediately.

Telephone interviews and recording

Where we interview you by telephone, the interviewer identifies NigeriaPolls at the start of the call and tells you the purpose of the call. Calls may be recorded for quality assurance and to verify that an interview was conducted correctly; you are told this before the recording begins and you may decline and continue without being recorded. Recordings are held only as long as needed for quality checks on that study. Before any outbound calling we screen our list against the Nigerian Communications Commission do-not-disturb register, and we keep our own do-not-contact list which is honoured across every study we run, including work commissioned by clients.

5. Data retention

De-identified poll responses are kept indefinitely as part of the historical research record. They carry no telephone number, name or other identifier.

Identifiers such as telephone numbers are kept for 90 days after fieldwork closes, which is the period we need for back-checks and for answering questions about the results, and for up to 24 months for dialling records so that do-not-call requests can be honoured. Call recordings are kept for 90 days.

One exception, deliberately: if you ask us never to call you again, we keep the minimum record needed to honour that, indefinitely. Deleting it would mean calling you again.

6. Third-party services

• Hetzner Online GmbH (server hosting, Nuremberg, Germany), where our database and application run on our own server
• Supabase (application database, London, United Kingdom)
• Lineserve (the Lagos server that runs our telephone interviewing and holds any call recording) — in Nigeria
• Resend (transactional email, United States)
• Termii (SMS delivery, Lagos)
• WhatsApp Business (survey delivery and responses)

7. Where your data is stored, and transfers outside Nigeria

Your personal data is stored and processed outside Nigeria. Our servers and database are located in Germany. Some services we rely on process data in the United Kingdom and the United States, as listed above.

Telephone calls are the exception, and deliberately so. If we interview you by phone, the call and any recording of it are handled on our own server in Lagos. Your voice does not leave Nigeria, and no other company carries that call.

We have declared these transfers to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission as part of our registration as a data controller of major importance. Wherever your data is processed, the protections described in this policy apply to it, and our processors are bound by written terms requiring confidentiality, appropriate security, and no onward transfer without our instruction.

If you would rather your data were not processed outside Nigeria, we cannot currently offer that, and you may ask us to delete it.

8. Contact

Data Protection Officer (DPO):
NigeriaPolls
Email: [email protected]

To ask us for a copy of your data, to have it corrected or deleted, or to tell us never to contact you again, the quickest route is the data request form.

This policy may be updated from time to time. We will notify panel members of material changes by email and SMS.