Effective as of June 24, 2025
This Privacy Policy explains how CropSense Agri-Solutions & Services (data controller) and CipherSense AI Technologies Limited (data joint controller, registered with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission as a Data Controller and Processor under registration number NDPC/DCP/13640) collect, store, use, and disclose personal information from users of CropSense applications and websites (cropsense.africa and its subdomains), and related services and goods. CropSense, including YieldRank™, is offered to farmers, agribusinesses, financial institutions, and other partners across Nigeria and other African markets, and this Privacy Policy applies to users and institutional customers wherever they are located.
1. Acceptance of Privacy Policy
Users must provide consent for data collection, processing (including automated decision-making), use, and transfer to use the CropSense platform. The company considers consent and legitimate interest as legal bases for data processing. Users may revoke consent by deleting their profile or exercising specified rights. Non-agreement means you should not use the Services. Where your information is submitted to us by a partner organization rather than by you directly, Section 3.5 explains how this Privacy Policy applies to you.
2. Changes to Privacy Policy
The company may periodically change, amend, or update this Privacy Policy. Material changes affecting user rights trigger email notification, website notice, or new policy acceptance requests. Users should review the Privacy Policy page regularly. Continued usage of the platforms after the updated Privacy Policy's effective date shows your consent to the amended Privacy Policy.
3. Data We Collect About You
The company collects various information types—personal and non-personal—to provide and improve services, potentially through third-party analytics providers.
3.1 Personal Information
Voluntarily provided personally identifiable information includes:
- Contact Information: Name, email address, phone number, mailing address
- Account Information: Username, password, security questions and answers
- Professional Information: Farm/business name, job title, agricultural specialization
- Payment Information: Billing address, payment method details (processed securely through third-party payment processors)
- Communication Data: Messages, feedback, and correspondence with our support team
3.2 Agricultural and Operational Data
- Farm Data: Location coordinates, field boundaries, crop types, planting schedules
- Sensor Data: Soil moisture, temperature, pH levels, nutrient content, weather conditions
- Equipment Data: Machinery performance, maintenance schedules, usage patterns
- Harvest Data: Yield information, quality metrics, harvest dates and volumes
- Financial Data: Production costs, revenue figures, profitability metrics (if provided)
3.3 Technical Information
Automatically collected information about device and usage patterns includes:
- Device Information: IP address, browser type, operating system, device identifiers
- Usage Data: Pages visited, time spent on site, click patterns, feature usage
- Location Data: GPS coordinates from mobile devices (with your permission)
- Cookies and Tracking: Information collected through cookies, web beacons, and similar technologies
3.4 Third-Party Information
The company may receive information from third-party service providers, treated per this Privacy Policy:
- Weather Data: Information from meteorological services and weather stations
- Market Data: Commodity prices, market trends from agricultural data providers
- Satellite Imagery: Crop monitoring data from satellite and aerial imaging services
Aggregated and anonymized data—no longer reasonably associated with identified or identifiable persons—may be used for any business purpose, including large-scale algorithm training via AI or machine learning.
3.5 Data Submitted by Partners on Your Behalf
In addition to information you provide directly, information about you may be submitted to CropSense by an extension agent, cooperative, agribusiness aggregator, financial institution, NGO, or government agency that you work with ("Partner"), including as part of a Digital Farmer Registry, remote farm monitoring, geo-tagged crop profiling, or a similar program. This can happen even if you have never created a CropSense account or visited our applications or websites yourself.
Where a Partner submits your information to CropSense, the Partner is responsible for having a lawful basis, including any necessary consent, for collecting and sharing your information, and for giving you notice that your farm data will be processed by CropSense and, where applicable, shared with the Partner's own customers or funders, such as a financial institution assessing your eligibility for a loan as described in Section 8.3. CropSense processes this information on the Partner's instructions and treats it in line with this Privacy Policy.
If you were enrolled by a Partner and want to know what information CropSense holds about you, correct it, or have it deleted, you can exercise the rights described in Section 7 by contacting us at the details in Section 12, even if you do not have a CropSense account. We may direct your request to the relevant Partner where it is better placed to resolve it, but will not use that as a reason to refuse to respond.
4. How We May Use Your Information
The company uses collected information for various purposes:
- To Provide and Maintain Our Website: Operating, delivering, and facilitating services, including crop management tools, data analysis, and insights
- To Improve and Personalize Your Experience: Understanding usage patterns and developing tailored products, services, features, and functionality
- To Communicate with You: Sending updates, security alerts, technical notices, confirmations, invoices, and administrative messages. Marketing and promotional communications may also be sent; opt-out is available
- For Customer Support: Responding to inquiries, offering support, and resolving issues
- For Research and Development: Performing research and analysis on market trends, developing features, and improving insight accuracy
- For Security and Fraud Prevention: Finding and preventing fraud, detecting security incidents, and protecting the Website and users
- For Legal Compliance: Complying with applicable laws, regulations, legal processes, and government requests
- To Enforce Our Terms, Conditions, and Policies: Enforcing user agreements and other policies
Data use for other purposes requires user consent unless law requires otherwise.
5. How We Share Your Information
5.1 We Do Not Sell Personal Information
CropSense does not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes.
5.2 Authorized Sharing
The company may share information in these circumstances:
- Service Providers: With trusted third-party vendors assisting in service operations, including cloud hosting and data storage providers, payment processing companies, customer support platforms, analytics and monitoring services, and equipment manufacturers and IoT device providers
- Business Partners: With agricultural service providers, equipment manufacturers, financial services providers, and research institutions when users explicitly consent to sharing for enhanced services
- Business Transfers: Information may be shared or transferred in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of the business
- Social Logins: The App allows registration and login with Google. Choosing this option results in receiving email and/or full name from the social media provider. The company does not control other usages by third-party social media providers and advises reviewing their policies
- Aggregated Data: Anonymized, aggregated data that cannot identify individual users may be shared for industry research, benchmarking, and market analysis
5.3 Legal Requirements
The company may disclose information when required by law or when disclosure is necessary to:
- Comply with legal processes, court orders, or government requests
- Protect the rights, property, or safety of CropSense, users, or others
- Investigate potential violations of terms of service
- Prevent fraud or other illegal activities
6. Data Security and Retention
6.1 Data Security
We implement reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. These measures include:
- Encryption: Using SSL/TLS encryption for data in transit
- Access Controls: Restricting access to authorized personnel only
- Regular Security Audits: Conducting periodic reviews of security practices
- Data Minimization: Collecting only necessary personal data for stated purposes
No Internet transmission or electronic storage method is 100% secure. While commercially acceptable protection means are used, absolute security cannot be guaranteed.
6.2 Data Retention
Personal information is retained only as long as necessary to fulfill collection purposes, including legal, accounting, or reporting requirements:
- Account Information: Retained while account is active and for 7 years after closure
- Agricultural Data: Retained for 10 years to support long-term trend analysis
- Transaction Records: Retained for 7 years for tax and accounting purposes
- Communication Records: Retained for 5 years for customer service purposes
- YieldRank Scores and Risk Factors: Retained for the duration of the associated loan or credit relationship, and thereafter as required for audit and regulatory review (see Section 8.5)
Upon retention expiration, information is securely deleted or anonymized unless longer retention is legally required.
7. Your Privacy Rights
Depending on your location and applicable data protection laws, you may possess certain rights regarding your personal information.
7.1 Access and Portability
- Access and review personal information
- Request data copies in portable format
- Receive information about data processing
7.2 Correction and Updates
- Update or correct inaccurate personal information
- Complete incomplete data records
- Modify communication preferences
7.3 Deletion Rights
Users may request personal information deletion, subject to:
- Legal obligations requiring data retention
- Legitimate business interests
- Ongoing contractual relationships
7.4 Opt-Out Rights
Users can opt out of:
- Marketing communications (while still receiving service-related messages)
- Non-essential data collection practices
- Certain data sharing arrangements
7.5 Exercising Your Rights
To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the contact details provided in Section 12 of this Privacy Policy. The company will respond per applicable data protection laws and may verify identity before fulfilling requests.
8. Automated Decision-Making and YieldRank Credit Scoring
YieldRank™ is our agricultural credit scoring engine. It processes agronomic data (crop-soil suitability, historical yield, satellite crop health), climate data (drought/flood exposure, climate stress factors), and alternative financial proxies (mobile money history, input purchase data, cooperative participation records) to generate a credit score, risk band, and supporting risk factors for a farm or applicant. This is a form of automated decision-making and profiling.
8.1 CropSense Does Not Make Lending Decisions
CropSense does not lend, underwrite, or make the final decision to approve, decline, or price a loan. YieldRank scores are supplied to our financial institution partners (banks, fintech lenders, microfinance institutions, cooperatives and agribusiness aggregators) as one input into their own credit process. The lending decision, and any legal or similarly significant effect that follows from it, rests with the financial institution, not CropSense.
8.2 How Scores Are Generated
Scores are produced by proprietary AI models calibrated to local soils, climate and cropping systems, and are refreshed monthly through the crop cycle. Model performance, including known limitations such as satellite resolution constraints on sub-hectare intercropped plots, is documented and made available to institutional partners for review.
8.3 Data Submitted by Financial Institution Partners
Where a financial institution or agribusiness aggregator submits an applicant's information for scoring — for example, through bulk applicant scoring or the YieldRank Integration API — CropSense processes that information on the institution's instructions, acting as a data processor for that data, even though CropSense remains a joint controller for data collected directly through its own applications and websites. Institutional partners are responsible for obtaining the applicant's consent or establishing another lawful basis before submitting their information to YieldRank, and for providing the applicant with notice of the assessment, consistent with applicable law and our partner agreements. Farmers and field agents who use the YieldRank self-assessment feature directly are treated as CropSense users for that data, and this Privacy Policy applies to them in the same way as to other CropSense users.
8.4 Your Rights Regarding Automated Decisions
If a YieldRank score or risk band is used as part of a decision that produces legal or similarly significant effects concerning you — such as a loan being declined — you have the right to:
- Request meaningful information about the logic, data pillars, and key factors behind the score;
- Request a review of the score, including by a human reviewer, where the decision was based solely on automated processing;
- Express your point of view and contest the score or the decision made using it; and
- Request correction of inaccurate underlying data used to generate the score.
Because the lending decision itself is made by the financial institution, you should raise a dispute about a specific loan decision with that institution in the first instance. To exercise these rights with respect to CropSense's processing of your data, or to request a copy of the score logic and factors, contact us using the details in Section 12 of this Privacy Policy.
8.5 Retention of Scores
YieldRank scores and their supporting risk factors are retained for the duration of the associated loan or credit relationship, and for the periods described in Section 6.2, to support monitoring, audit and regulatory review.
9. Children's Privacy
The Website is not intended for children under 13 years old. The company does not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13. Parents or guardians aware their child provided information should contact us. Upon discovering personal information collected from children under 13 without parental consent verification, the company will remove that information from servers.
10. Third-Party Links and Services
Services may contain links to third-party websites or integrate external services. This Privacy Policy does not apply to third-party services. Users are encouraged to review third-party service privacy policies accessed through the platform.
11. Compliance
CropSense, including YieldRank™, operates across multiple African markets, and this policy is designed to meet applicable data protection requirements in each. In Nigeria, we comply with the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023 (NDPA), the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) 2019, and other relevant Nigerian laws. CipherSense AI Technologies Limited, as joint controller, is registered with the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) as a Data Controller and Processor under registration number NDPC/DCP/13640.
As a matter of policy, and to support financial institution partners and users outside Nigeria, we also align our data handling practices with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including its principles on lawful basis for processing, data minimization, purpose limitation, and data subject rights, even in markets where GDPR does not directly apply. Where the law of another African jurisdiction governs your use of the Services, we comply with that jurisdiction's applicable data protection framework as well.
12. Contact Us
For questions or concerns about this privacy policy or personal data handling, contact us at: hello@cropsenseai.com