Summary at a glance
HeckerPeople is a workforce management service used by employers to run attendance, leave, payroll and performance for their staff. This summary is a plain-language overview; the sections that follow are the binding detail.
Who we are
HeckerPeople ("we", "us", "our") is operated by Heckerbella Limited, Ibukun House, 14 Adetokunbo Ademola Street, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria. We provide a human resources and workforce management platform, available at https://heckerpeople.app and through the HeckerPeople mobile app.
This policy explains what personal information the platform and the app collect, why we collect it, who it is shared with, how long it is kept, and the choices and rights you have. It applies to employees and administrators who use the service, and to job applicants who apply through our careers pages.
Your employer and us
Almost everyone who uses HeckerPeople does so because their employer subscribed to it. That distinction matters for your privacy rights:
- Your employer is the data controller. They decide which features to switch on, which work locations to geofence, whether biometric attendance is used, and how long records are retained. Their own internal privacy and HR policies apply to you alongside this one.
- We are the data processor. We host and operate the service and act on your employer's instructions. We do not use your employment records for our own purposes.
Where we decide how and why data is used — for example, the account and billing information of the subscribing company, or security logs we keep to protect the service — we act as a controller and are directly responsible for that data.
Requests about your employment records normally go to your employer first. If you ask us directly, we will forward your request to them and support them in answering it, as described under Your rights.
Information we collect
We collect the following categories of information. We do not collect anything not listed here.
| Category | What it includes | Why we collect it |
|---|---|---|
| Account and identity | Name, staff or employee ID, work email address, phone number, job title, department, employing company, profile photo, and login credentials. | To create your account, authenticate you, and show you the right records for your role. |
| Employment records | Attendance and shift history, leave and exemption requests and their approvals, KPI and appraisal entries, salary and payslip details, and documents your employer uploads to your file. | To deliver the HR functions your employer uses the service for. |
| Location | Precise GPS coordinates and accuracy, captured at the moment you clock in, clock out, or record a site-visit action, plus the calculated distance from the approved work location. | To verify that attendance is recorded at an authorised work location. See Location data. |
| Biometric data | A numeric facial template (an embedding derived from your face), fingerprint captures and the templates derived from them, where your employer enables biometric attendance. | To confirm that the person clocking in is you. Opt-in only. See Biometric data. |
| Photos and images | Your profile photo, the photo captured at clock-in where your employer requires one, and photos attached to site visits. | To provide a visual audit record of attendance and field work, and to identify you in the platform. |
| Device and technical data | A device identifier for the phone used to clock in, app version, operating system, IP address, and server logs of requests to our API. | To keep your session secure, detect fraudulent or duplicate clock-ins, debug faults, and protect the service. |
| Support and correspondence | Messages you send to us, and the contents of support requests. | To answer you and to keep a record of the issue. |
| Applicant data | If you apply for a job through our careers pages: your CV, contact details, application answers and interview records. | To let the hiring employer assess your application. |
| Billing data (subscribing companies only) | Company name, address, billing contact, plan, and payment references. Card details are entered directly with our payment processor and never reach our servers. | To take subscription payments and issue receipts. |
What we do not collect
We do not collect your contacts, your calendar, your messages, your browsing history outside our app, or your card numbers. We do not embed advertising SDKs, and we do not build advertising or marketing profiles about you.
Device permissions
The mobile app asks for the permissions below. You can decline any of them, and you can withdraw any of them later in your device settings; where a permission is required for a specific feature, only that feature stops working.
| Permission | Why the app asks for it | If you decline |
|---|---|---|
| Location | To read your GPS position when you clock in, clock out, or record a site visit, so the app can confirm you are inside an approved geofence. | You cannot clock in from the app; ask your employer about an alternative method. |
| Camera | To capture your profile photo, the attendance photo at clock-in, site-visit photos, and images during biometric enrolment. | You cannot use photo-verified clock-in or enrol biometrics. |
| Photo library | To let you pick an existing photo as your profile picture, and to save a photo you have taken. | You can still take a new photo with the camera. |
| Face ID / Touch ID / device biometrics | To let you unlock the app quickly. This check happens entirely on your device; your fingerprint or face is handled by the operating system and is never sent to us. | You sign in with your username and password instead. |
| Bluetooth | To detect and connect to an external fingerprint scanner during biometric enrolment. We do not use Bluetooth to derive your location. | Fingerprint enrolment with an external scanner is unavailable. |
| Notifications | To alert you about leave approvals, attendance reminders, and other workflow events. | You will only see these updates when you open the app. |
Biometric data
Biometric data is sensitive personal information and we treat it accordingly. Your employer may enable facial or fingerprint verification for attendance so that one employee cannot clock in on another's behalf.
Consent
We capture biometric data only after you have been told what is being captured and why, and you have given your express consent in the app. Enrolment is a deliberate, separate step — it never happens in the background.
How facial verification works
- Face detection and the conversion of your face into a numeric template run on your device.
- What is stored for matching is a mathematical embedding — a fixed-length list of numbers derived from your face. It is not a photograph and cannot be viewed as one.
- At clock-in, the app produces a fresh embedding and compares it to your enrolled one to confirm it is you.
- Where your employer requires a clock-in photo as an audit record, that photo is stored separately from the embedding and is visible to your HR administrators.
How fingerprint enrolment works
Where your employer uses fingerprint attendance, fingerprint captures and the templates derived from them are stored against your employee record so that a scan at a later date can be matched to you. This is distinct from Face ID or Touch ID on your phone, which never leaves your device and is never shared with us.
Limits we place on ourselves
- Biometric data is used only to verify identity for attendance. It is never used for surveillance, emotion or demographic inference, or any form of profiling.
- It is never sold, rented, or disclosed for anyone else's commercial purposes.
- It is disclosed outside your employer only where the law compels us, as described under Sharing and disclosure.
- You may withdraw consent and erase your biometric data at any time, from inside the app — see Account and data deletion.
Withdrawing consent
Consent you cannot take back is not consent. In the mobile app, open Profile → Biometrics → Withdraw Biometric Consent. Your facial template and every enrolled fingerprint are erased from our servers immediately and permanently. You can enrol again later if you choose to.
Two things follow from withdrawing, and you should know both before you do it:
- Your HR administrators are told. Biometric verification exists to stop one person clocking in as another, so your employer is notified that yours is switched off. The notice records that you withdrew consent and what was erased — nothing more.
- Your employer may require biometric attendance. If they do, you will not be able to clock in from the app until you enrol again, and you should ask HR how to record your attendance instead. If they do not require it, you carry on clocking in as normal, verified by location alone. The app tells you which of the two applies to you before you confirm.
Withdrawing consent never costs you access to your own records, and we do not treat it as a reason to refuse you any part of the service.
Location data
Attendance geofencing is the reason the app asks for location. When you clock in, clock out, or record a site-visit action, the app reads your current GPS coordinates, compares them to the work locations your employer has approved, and stores the coordinates and the distance from that location alongside the attendance record.
We do not track your movements. Location is read at the moment you perform an attendance action, not continuously, and not while you are off the clock. We do not build a location history, and we do not share location with advertisers or data brokers — we do not work with any.
Your employer's administrators can see where an attendance record was taken and whether it fell inside or outside the approved radius. If you clock in from outside an approved location, that fact is flagged on the record.
How we use information
We use the information described above to:
- Authenticate you and keep your account and session secure.
- Record and verify attendance, including geofence and identity checks.
- Process leave and exemption requests through your organisation's approval chain.
- Produce payroll, payslips, KPI records and management reports for your employer.
- Notify you about approvals, rejections and other workflow events.
- Provide support and respond to your questions.
- Detect, investigate and prevent fraud, abuse and security incidents.
- Maintain, debug and improve the reliability of the service.
- Meet legal, tax and regulatory obligations.
- Bill subscribing companies and manage their subscriptions.
We do not use your personal data for automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects on you without human involvement. Attendance and geofence flags are recorded for a human at your employer to review; the platform does not itself impose disciplinary outcomes.
Legal bases for processing
Where the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, the UK/EU GDPR, or a comparable law applies, we and your employer rely on the following bases:
- Contract — to deliver the service to your employer and to administer your employment records.
- Consent — for biometric enrolment, and for optional features you switch on. You can withdraw consent at any time.
- Legal obligation — to keep payroll, tax and statutory employment records.
- Legitimate interests — to secure the service, prevent fraudulent attendance, and keep the platform working, balanced against your rights and freedoms.
Third-party services
| Provider | Purpose | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Paystack | Subscription payments from employers. | The subscribing company's billing details and card data, entered directly with Paystack. Card numbers never reach our servers. |
| Xpress Payments | Salary disbursement, where an employer enables it. | Payee bank account details needed to make the payment. |
| Google ML Kit (on-device) | Detecting a face in the camera frame during enrolment and clock-in. | Nothing. This runs on your device; images are not sent to Google by the app for this purpose. |
| Hosting and email providers | Running our servers and delivering transactional email such as approvals and password resets. | Data stored on our servers, and the contents of the emails we send you. |
The app contains no advertising SDK, no cross-app tracking, and no third-party behavioural analytics.
How long we keep data
- Employment records (attendance, leave, payroll, KPI) are kept for as long as your employer's account is active and for as long as their retention policy and the applicable employment, tax and statutory rules require.
- Biometric data is kept only while you remain enrolled and employed. It is deleted when you withdraw consent, when your employer removes your enrolment, or when your employment record is deleted — whichever comes first.
- Attendance photos and location points follow your employer's retention policy for attendance records.
- Server and security logs are kept for a limited period for security and debugging, then deleted.
- Applicant data is kept for the hiring employer's stated retention period, after which it is deleted or anonymised.
When an employer's subscription ends, we delete or return their data in line with our agreement with them. Backups are purged on a rolling schedule.
Account and data deletion
You can ask for your account and the personal data held about you to be deleted. Because your records belong to your employer's account, how the request is handled depends on who you are.
If you are an employee
- To delete biometric data only — do it yourself in the app, under Profile → Biometrics → Withdraw Biometric Consent. Your facial template and fingerprints are erased straight away. You can also ask your HR administrator, or email us at support@heckerbella.com with the subject "Withdraw biometric consent". See Biometric data for what changes afterwards.
- To delete your account and employment records — ask your employer's HR administrator, who can remove your record from the platform. You may also email us at support@heckerbella.com from your registered work email with the subject "Account deletion request". We will verify your identity and pass the request to your employer, who as data controller decides what may be erased and what must be retained by law.
If you are an employer or account administrator
Email support@heckerbella.com from your registered administrator address requesting deletion of your company account. We will confirm, then delete your company's account, employee records, attendance data, biometric data, photos and uploaded documents.
What happens, and when
- We acknowledge deletion requests within 7 days and complete verified requests within 30 days.
- Deleted data is removed from live systems immediately on completion and purged from backups on our rolling backup cycle, within 90 days.
- Biometric data and photos are deleted outright — they are never retained after a deletion request.
What we may have to keep. Payroll, tax and statutory employment records that your employer is legally obliged to retain cannot be deleted on request, and records needed to establish or defend a legal claim may be retained until it is resolved. We keep the minimum necessary, and we delete it when the obligation ends. We will tell you if anything is retained and why.
How we protect data
- All traffic between the app, the web platform and our servers is encrypted in transit with TLS (HTTPS).
- API requests from the mobile app are signed and verified, so requests cannot be forged or replayed.
- Passwords are stored as salted one-way hashes. We cannot read your password, and neither can our staff.
- Access is scoped by role and by company: administrators see only their own organisation, and approvers see only their own department.
- Access to production data by our personnel is restricted to those who need it to operate or support the service.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority and the affected employers without undue delay, and we will support your employer in notifying you where the law requires it.
International transfers
We are based in Nigeria and store data on servers operated by our hosting providers. Some of our service providers may process data outside your country. Where personal data is transferred across borders, we take the steps required by the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 and, where applicable, the GDPR — relying on an adequacy decision or on standard contractual clauses, and satisfying ourselves that the data remains protected to an equivalent standard.
Your rights
Subject to the law that applies to you, you have the right to:
- Access the personal data held about you, and receive a copy.
- Correct data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
- Delete your data, subject to the legal retention limits described above.
- Withdraw consent at any time, including consent to biometric enrolment. Withdrawal does not affect processing carried out before you withdrew.
- Object to or restrict processing in certain circumstances.
- Portability — receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
- Complain to a supervisory authority. In Nigeria, that is the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC).
To exercise these rights, contact your employer's HR administrator, or email us at support@heckerbella.com. We will verify your identity before acting, respond within 30 days, and tell you if we need longer. We do not charge for this, and we will never penalise you for exercising a right.
Children's privacy
HeckerPeople is a workplace tool intended for employed adults. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have collected data from a child, we will delete it. If you believe a child's data has reached us, contact us at support@heckerbella.com.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the service changes or as the law requires. The "Last updated" date at the top of the page always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we handle your personal data — particularly biometric or location data — we will give notice in the app or by email before it takes effect, and, where the law requires it, ask for your consent again.
Contact us
For any question about this policy, or to exercise your rights:
- Company: Heckerbella Limited
- Privacy enquiries: support@heckerbella.com
- General enquiries: info@heckerpeople.app
- Address: Ibukun House, 14 Adetokunbo Ademola Street, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria
- Website: https://heckerpeople.app
If you are an employee, your employer's HR team is usually the fastest route for questions about your own records.