Privacy policy

Who runs Ratibu

Ratibu is run by the university (“we”). This policy explains how Ratibu handles personal information, including information it receives from Google when you sign in with your Google account.

What Ratibu does

Ratibu publishes semester timetables. University admins set each semester’s dates and holidays, lecturers schedule their weekly classes, and students join classes with a code. Each class is placed on the lecturer’s Google Calendar as a recurring event, with the enrolled students invited, so the class appears on everyone’s calendar and stays up to date when it changes.

What we collect

Your Google account profile when you sign in: your name, email address, profile photo and Google account ID. We use the Google scopes openid, email and profile for this.
Lecturers only, Google Calendar access: when a lecturer allows it, Ratibu receives permission to create, change and delete events on that lecturer’s Google Calendar (the calendar.events scope). Google gives us a token for this, which we store so that classes keep updating after the lecturer signs out.
Information people enter in Ratibu: semester names and dates, holidays and breaks, class codes, titles, rooms, times and descriptions, the email addresses of students enrolled in a class, and notes lecturers write about cancelled or moved sessions.
Schools and memberships: which schools you belong to and your role at each (student, lecturer or admin). Each school’s admins see only their own school’s members, classes and rooms; they can’t see which other schools you belong to.
Class reps: which students are reps for a class, and any room changes they make, with their name and reason. These are shown to the class and its lecturer.
Rooms: the university’s buildings, floors and rooms, and which classes and assessments use them. Anyone signed in can see which rooms are booked, by which class, and when.
Assessments: CATs, assignment deadlines and exams that lecturers schedule, with any notes they add.
Your calendar subscription link: a private, random address that calendar apps use to fetch your timetable. Anyone who has the link can see your classes and assessments, so keep it to yourself; you can replace it with a new one at any time on the Calendar page, which stops the old one working.
A sign-in cookie that keeps you signed in for up to seven days, and the session record it points to. Ratibu uses no advertising or analytics cookies and no tracking tools. Your choice of light or dark theme is saved in your own browser only.

Google user data

This section describes exactly how Ratibu accesses, uses, stores and shares data it receives from Google.

Access: for every user, the basic profile above. For lecturers who grant it, the ability to manage events on their calendar.
Use: the profile is used to sign you in, show your name in Ratibu, decide whether you are a student, lecturer or admin, and enrol you in classes. Calendar access is used only to create each of the lecturer’s classes as a recurring event, invite the class’s students, and update or delete those same events when the class changes. Ratibu does not read, copy, change or delete any other events on the lecturer’s calendar.
Students: students never give Ratibu access to their calendars. Classes reach them through their subscription link and, unless they turn it off, as ordinary Google Calendar invitations from their lecturer.
Storage: profile details and lecturers’ calendar tokens are stored in Ratibu’s database (see How we store and protect it).
Sharing: Google user data is not sold, not used for advertising, not used to train AI or machine-learning models, and not transferred to anyone except as needed to run Ratibu (see Who we share it with).

Ratibu’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

How we use it

To sign you in and keep you signed in.
To show you your timetable and your classes.
To place classes on Google Calendar and keep them up to date, as described above.
To let admins manage semesters and staff roles, and to let lecturers manage their classes and students.
To diagnose problems: when a calendar update fails, the error is recorded so the lecturer can see what went wrong and retry.

We don’t use personal information for advertising, profiling or any purpose unrelated to running Ratibu.

Google, to sign you in and to deliver calendar events, under Google’s own privacy policy.
Our hosting and database providers, which store and process data on our behalf only to run Ratibu (Vercel, for hosting, and Turso, for the database).
When the law requires it, for example in response to a valid legal request.

We do not sell or rent personal information.

Who can see what

Lecturers see the names and email addresses of the students in their own classes.
Students see the name and email of each class’s lecturer. Students can’t see each other’s email addresses on calendar events.
Admins see the semesters, how many classes each has and whether they are on Google Calendar, and the list of staff.

How we store and protect it

All traffic between your browser, Ratibu and Google is encrypted with HTTPS.
Data is stored in Ratibu’s database, which only the Ratibu server can reach, using a secret access key.
Lecturers’ calendar tokens are used only on the server. They are never sent to anyone’s browser or shown in the app.
Access to the database and the server settings is limited to the people who run Ratibu at the university.

How long we keep it

Your account details are kept while you use Ratibu.
Classes and enrolments are kept for the semester and afterwards as a record of the timetable, unless the university decides on a shorter period.
Sign-in sessions are deleted once they expire, at most seven days after your last visit.
Deleting a class removes its event from everyone’s calendar and deletes its enrolments and session notes.
When a lecturer removes Ratibu’s calendar access, their stored token stops working and is deleted the next time Ratibu tries to use it.

Your choices and rights

Students can leave a class at any time; it’s removed from their calendar.
Lecturers can remove Ratibu’s calendar access at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Their classes then stop updating until they connect again.
You can ask for a copy of your personal information, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it and your account. To do so, contact the ICT help desk at the university. We will respond within 30 days.
You may also have rights under data-protection law where you live, such as Kenya’s Data Protection Act, 2019, including the right to complain to the data-protection authority.

Children

Ratibu is for university students and staff. It is not directed at children under 13.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version is posted on this page with a new date. Significant changes will also be announced in Ratibu.

Contact

For questions about this policy or your information, contact the ICT help desk at the university.