Privacy Policy

1. Who we are and who this covers

OverhaulOS is a prepaid breakdown-recovery network. This policy covers everyone who uses it: drivers, mechanics, workshop owners and technicians, controllers, accounts and ambassador staff at transport companies, our own branch and head-office staff, and people whose details reach us from somebody else, such as a referee named on a mechanic's application or an emergency contact.

1. 1.1OverhaulOS is a pan-African network and operates in each country where it has launched. This policy applies in all of them.
2. 1.2OverhaulOS is established in Namibia, so Namibian law governs this policy by default. Where the data-protection law of the country you are in gives you stronger rights, that law applies to you and prevails over anything here.
3. 1.3Where you use OverhaulOS as an employee of a transport company, that company decides which of its drivers use the service and what it does with the records afterwards. We each answer for our own handling of that data.

2. What we collect

We collect what a recovery needs and the record it leaves behind. Nothing here is gathered for marketing, because we do none.

1. 2.1Your account. Name, email address, phone number and a second number if you give one, your role, and the company, workshop or branch you belong to. A profile photograph if you upload one.
2. 2.2If you are a mechanic or technician. The identity, licence, trade-certificate, insurance and banking documents you upload for verification, a photograph of your face, and your base position, which is the place we measure distance from when deciding who to offer a job to. If you work for yourself, that base is usually your home.
3. 2.3If we pay you. Your bank account name, number, bank and branch code. The same details for your company's account if it asks for its prepaid balance back.
4. 2.4The work itself. Breakdowns, vehicles and registrations, invoices, prepaid balances, ledger entries, bids, ratings you give and ratings you receive, and the notes our staff write when they approve, dispute or pay something.
5. 2.5Safety. Panic alarms you raise, welfare checks and whether you answered them, safety check-ins you start yourself and whether you answered each one in time, and the positions described in section 6. Your safety codes are stored only as one-way hashes: we cannot read them back, and nobody at OverhaulOS can tell you what yours is.
6. 2.6Technical. Sign-in times and sessions, the language and theme you chose, and the error reports described in section 11. We do not collect browsing history, contacts, photographs other than those you upload, or anything from your device beyond position while a job or alarm is open.

3. Where it comes from

Most of what we hold about you, you gave us. The rest arrives in ways worth naming, because you may not expect it.

1. 3.1From you, when you register, upload a document, report a breakdown, bid for work or raise an alarm.
2. 3.2From your employer, when a transport company invites you onto its account as a driver, controller or accounts user, or names you as a contact.
3. 3.3From another person, when a mechanic names you as a referee, or a driver names you as an emergency contact. If that is how we got your details and you would rather we did not hold them, see section 15.
4. 3.4From the platform itself, as a by-product of work done on it: timestamps, who approved what, and the ledger.

4. Why we use it, and on what basis

We use personal data for the purposes below and no others. Where the law that applies to you works in terms of a lawful basis, the basis for each purpose is given here.

1. 4.1To run a recovery. Matching a breakdown to a mechanic, routing them, and keeping both sides informed. Basis: performance of the contract between us, and our legitimate interest in operating the network.
2. 4.2To verify who people are. Checking identity, licences, insurance and trade certificates before a provider can accept work. Basis: legal obligation where one applies, and otherwise our legitimate interest, and that of every driver who meets a stranger at a roadside, in knowing the stranger is who they claim to be.
3. 4.3To answer emergencies. Notifying the people and providers described in section 7. Basis: the vital interests of the person in danger, and the contract.
4. 4.4To take and settle money. Prepaid balances, holds, invoices, fees and payouts. Basis: contract, and legal obligation for the accounting records.
5. 4.5To keep the service safe and working. Sign-in security, fraud prevention, fault diagnosis. Basis: legitimate interest.
6. 4.6To meet the law. Tax, company and anti-fraud obligations in each country we operate in. Basis: legal obligation.

5. What we never do with it

Some commitments are easier to judge than a purpose list, because they are absolute.

1. 5.1We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.
2. 5.2We run no advertising and no behavioural tracking. There is no advertising network, no advertising pixel and no third-party analytics, and nothing here follows you to other websites.
3. 5.3We do not use your data to train models for anyone outside OverhaulOS.
4. 5.4We do not read the content of messages between a fleet and a mechanic except where one of them reports a message to us under the platform rules, or where we must in order to settle a dispute they have raised.

6. Your location

We record your device location when a job or a panic alarm is active, and at each check-in while a safety session you started is running: where a breakdown was reported, where the mechanic is while travelling to it, repeated position updates during an emergency, and the place you were standing when you confirmed you were all right.

1. 6.1We do not track you between jobs. The app reports no position when no job and no alarm is running, and there is no background trail.
2. 6.2Positions are kept after the job ends. They become part of the record of that recovery, which is the incident report an insurer or an auditor may later ask for.
3. 6.3A provider's base position is held separately from any job. It is used to decide who is near enough to be offered work, and it is visible to OverhaulOS staff and not to other providers.

7. Emergencies: who we tell, and exactly what we send

This is the most sensitive thing we do with your data, so it is written out in full rather than summarised. If you raise a panic alarm and your branch has connected an external response provider, usually an armed-response or monitoring company, we send that outside company a single message about that one emergency.

1. 7.1What is sent: your name, your phone number and your second number, your latitude, longitude and country, and, if the alarm is attached to a job that is open, your vehicle and trailer registration. It is sent so that somebody can reach you. It goes to their system directly, or by email to an address that control centre has given us, or both — whichever roads your branch has set up with them.
2. 7.2Your fleet's office, and the OverhaulOS branch managers and head office, receive the same alarm and work it regardless of whether an outside provider is connected.
3. 7.3A provider receives alarms only for the country they cover. Every provider begins in a test mode in which nothing is dispatched. No provider is ever given access to our database; they receive one message about one emergency and nothing else.
4. 7.4Raising an alarm means agreeing to this. There is no way to raise one and withhold the position, because a position is the only part of it that brings help to the right place.

8. Documents and identity

Documents are held in private, access-controlled storage and are reachable only through short-lived links issued to people whose role permits it. They are not public addresses and they are not indexed.

1. 8.1Only you, authorised OverhaulOS verifiers and, if you drive for a fleet, that fleet's own controllers, accounts desk and owner can open yours. Nobody at another company and no mechanic can.
2. 8.2You can remove a document yourself until it has been approved. Once approved you cannot, and neither can your company — only OverhaulOS can, with a recorded reason.
3. 8.3That rule is deliberate. A verified identity photograph is what lets a driver alone at a roadside recognise the person walking towards them, and it would be worth little if it could be withdrawn the moment it became inconvenient. If you want an approved document removed, ask us and we will tell you whether we are able to.

9. Who can see what

Your data is scoped to your company and your role, and that scoping is enforced by the database rather than by the screens. A screen can be redesigned by mistake; a refusal written into the data layer cannot.

1. 9.1A controller sees their own company's trucks, jobs and alarms, and no other company's. A mechanic sees the jobs they were offered or did, and their own payments. A fleet sees its own drivers' documents.
2. 9.2Your bank details are seen by you and by the OverhaulOS staff who pay you. They are shown to nobody else, and a payout screen shows only the last four digits.
3. 9.3OverhaulOS branch managers and head office can act on a company's behalf, such as approving a breakdown or an invoice, and every such action is recorded under the staff member's own name.
4. 9.4OverhaulOS staff see what their job needs: verifiers see documents, the finance desk sees money, a branch sees its own region. The only people outside OverhaulOS who receive anything about you are the emergency providers in section 7 and the service providers in section 11.

10. Decisions made automatically

Some things the platform decides without a person, and you should know which, because two of them affect whether you are offered work.

1. 10.1Dispatch. Which providers are offered a job is worked out from the position of the breakdown, the provider's base, their branch and whether they already hold a live job. A person does not choose.
2. 10.2Gates. Whether a recovery can be dispatched at all is decided by the prepaid balance, and whether a provider may accept work is decided by whether their documents are approved and current. Both are automatic, and both can be overridden by a named human being, which is recorded.
3. 10.3Nothing else is automatic. Verification, suspension, dispute rulings and payouts are decided by people, and the person is recorded. If an automatic decision has gone against you, ask us and a person will look at it.

11. Whose computers your data touches

We do not run our own data centre, and a map is drawn by somebody else's server. This sets out every outside party involved and what each one actually receives.

1. 11.1Our hosting provider, which operates in the European Union, holds the database, the sign-in system and file storage. Everything in section 2 sits there, processed on our instructions and on nobody else's.
2. 11.2Map pictures are image tiles your own browser or phone fetches directly from a map tile provider. That request carries your IP address and which square of the map you asked for, which is roughly where the breakdown is. It carries no name, no account and no job details, and we send that provider nothing ourselves.
3. 11.3Drive time and distance are calculated by a routing provider: our server sends two sets of coordinates and gets back a time and a route. It is told where, never who. Open in Maps hands the coordinates to your device's own maps application, and only when you tap it.
4. 11.4An error-monitoring service helps us find faults. When something breaks it receives the error, the page you were on, and your account identifier and role, so we can tell whose report it is. It also keeps a short recording of the screen, and that recording is masked before it leaves your device: every piece of text, every value you typed and every image is blanked, so it shows the shape of what happened and never the content. It is never sent the contents of a request, your session cookie, your name, your email address or your phone number.
5. 11.5An email provider sends the few messages this platform sends by email: an emergency alarm to a control centre that receives them that way, and the warning before a closed account is erased. It receives the address, the subject and the message — which for an emergency includes the driver’s name, numbers and position, exactly as section 7 describes.

12. Sending data between countries

OverhaulOS operates across Africa and its database sits in the European Union, so personal data crosses a border in the ordinary course of the service working.

1. 12.1Data about a recovery is visible to the branch covering where the vehicle is, which is not always the country the fleet is registered in. A truck that breaks down over a border is answered by the branch nearest the truck.
2. 12.2Where the law that applies to you requires a safeguard for a transfer out of your country, we rely on the contractual protections we have with our hosting provider and the recipients in section 11, and we will tell you what they are if you ask.
3. 12.3An emergency provider receives an alarm only for the country it covers, so emergency data does not leave the country the emergency is in.

13. How long we keep it

Different records have different lives, and the shortest honest answer is that financial records outlive accounts.

1. 13.1Recovery records, invoices and ledger entries are kept for as long as the tax and company law of the country the record belongs to requires, because they are financial records.
2. 13.2Identity and trade documents are kept while you are active on the network, and afterwards for as long as we must be able to show that we verified you.
3. 13.3Location history is kept as part of the job record it belongs to, and dies with it.
4. 13.4Sign-in sessions are removed when they fall idle. Error reports are kept for a short diagnostic period and then discarded.
5. 13.5If you close your account we remove your profile and your documents. We cannot remove entries from the financial ledger, because it is append-only by design and removing them would falsify the record of money that genuinely moved.

14. Your rights

You may ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask for a copy in a portable form, and object to a use of it that rests on our legitimate interest.

1. 14.1You can close your account yourself from your settings page, which removes your profile and documents without asking anybody.
2. 14.2Deletion is honoured except where we are required to keep something. The financial ledger in clause 13.5 is the main case, and we will tell you plainly when that is the reason rather than letting a request go quiet.
3. 14.3Where our use rests on consent, you can withdraw it at any time, and withdrawing it does not make what we did beforehand unlawful.
4. 14.4We do not charge for any of this, and we answer within one month. If a request is complicated we will say so and tell you how much longer we need.

15. Asking us, and complaining

Ask your OverhaulOS branch, or write to the address on our support page. We may ask you to confirm who you are before we hand over a copy of anything, which protects you rather than us.

1. 15.1If somebody gave us your details as a referee or an emergency contact and you would rather we did not hold them, tell us and we will remove them. You do not need an account to ask.
2. 15.2If you are not satisfied with how we have answered, you can complain to the data-protection authority of the country you are in, where one exists. You do not have to come to us first, though it is usually quicker.

16. Children

OverhaulOS is a commercial service for people working in road transport and vehicle repair. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly hold data about anyone under eighteen. If you believe we do, tell us and we will remove it.

17. Security, in plain terms

Security claims are easy to write and hard to check, so these are stated as things that are either true of the system or not.

1. 17.1Every table in our database refuses access by default and opens only to the person or role entitled to it. Nobody who is not signed in can read anything.
2. 17.2Your password is never stored in a form we can read. The credentials of our emergency partners are stored only as a one-way hash, so a breach of our database would not expose them.
3. 17.3Pages you see when signed in are sent with instructions that no cache may store them, so your screens are never served to somebody else.
4. 17.4Documents live in private storage reachable only by short-lived signed links. No card details ever pass through OverhaulOS: top-ups are bank transfers, made between you and your bank.
5. 17.5Head-office accounts, which can reach the most, require a second factor from an authenticator application.

18. If something goes wrong

No system is beyond a breach, and a policy that does not say what happens next is not worth much.

1. 18.1If personal data is lost or exposed in a way likely to harm you, we will tell you, and tell the relevant authority where the law requires it, without undue delay.
2. 18.2We will say what happened, what was affected, what we have done, and what you can do. We would rather tell you early and be imprecise than wait until the account is tidy.

19. Changes and contact

If we change how we use your data in a way that matters, we will tell you in the app and record it as a new version, rather than quietly updating this page. The version you accepted, the date and the language you read it in are kept, and you can see them on your settings page.

1. 19.1For any question about your data, or to exercise anything in section 14, contact your OverhaulOS branch or use the address on our support page.