Privacy

This site is static HTML. There is no account to create, no newsletter that requires your name, and no advertising.

This site uses Google Analytics. It records which pages are read, roughly where in the world readers are, and which links they follow. That is used for one thing: working out which guides are worth writing and which are failing people. Google receives this data and applies its own privacy policy to it.

This site also uses Microsoft Clarity. Clarity goes further than page counts: it records how people move through a page — scrolling, clicking, where attention stalls — and can replay an anonymised session. That is used to find guides where readers visibly get stuck, which is the failure this site exists to fix and the one hardest to spot from page views alone. Microsoft receives this data under its own privacy statement.

The calculators are masked from that recording. Every calculator on this site is marked so Clarity cannot capture what is typed into it. Your salary, your rent and your household budget are not in any session replay.

You can opt out of both with any tracker blocker, with your browser’s “do not track” setting where it is honoured, with Google’s opt-out add-on, or with Clarity’s opt-out. None of the site’s content or calculators depends on either, so blocking them costs you nothing.

The calculators never send your data anywhere. The salary calculator, the rent advance calculator, the VAT calculator and the cost of living calculator all run entirely in your browser. Your salary is not transmitted, logged or stored on a server. You can confirm this by opening your browser’s network tools and watching — the only outbound requests are the analytics ones described above, and they carry no figure you typed.

The live radio player connects you to the station, and only when you press play. On /radio each stream comes straight from that station’s own streaming server, not through this site, so the station or its streaming provider sees your IP address and that you are listening - as it would on the station’s own website. Nothing is requested from any station until you press play, and stopping a station closes the connection.

A few things are remembered on your own device using browser storage:

  • which items you have ticked on a checklist, so you do not lose your place when you reload the page in a queue
  • the exchange rate you set for currency conversions
  • the radio station you last played, and its volume
  • on Accra Pulse, the district your last location check found, and the answer you gave to each question; whether to ask you questions at all, how many you have been asked this visit, and whether you said not to ask again
  • in Home Ride, the driving game, your driver, your progress and your settings

You can clear all of them by clearing site data in your browser. None is ever sent to us - with one exception, also on Accra Pulse: the random code your browser keeps so that one phone has one vote, which goes with each vote and is stored only in a scrambled form (see below). Home Ride sends counts of what a drive did, described below, but none of what it keeps.

The search index is downloaded once and searched on your device, so what you search for stays on your phone.

The newsletter

Nothing on this site requires an email address. Every issue of the newsletter is published here as a web page and carried in the feed, so you can read all of it without subscribing to anything.

If you do subscribe, this is the whole of it:

  • Your email address is held by the email service that runs the list, and is used to send you the monthly newsletter. Nothing else.
  • It is never sold, rented, published, or passed to anyone for their own use.
  • Every issue carries a way to unsubscribe, and unsubscribing removes you.
  • We do not need and do not ask for your name, your phone number or anything else. An email address is enough to send an email.

If you would rather read it without being on a list at all, that is what the archive and the feed are for.

Lost and found

Lost and found is the one part of this site that stores what you send it, so this is exactly what happens to it.

What is public. A listing’s description - what the item is, roughly where and when - is shown to everyone, because that is the point of it. Listings that carry a long run of digits, an email address or a link are refused, so a card, account or phone number cannot end up in public by mistake.

What is private. The name, phone number and email you leave are never shown on a listing and are never returned by anything a visitor can request. They are shown to one person: whoever you reply to, or whoever replies to you, through the private link that comes with every listing. If an item is held by a mall, a station or a business, your reply goes to that place’s staff.

Where it is kept. In a database used only for this - Google Cloud Firestore, in Google’s London region - reached only by this site’s own server code, never directly from your browser. Google holds it on this site’s behalf. It is not sold, shared, or used for anything but getting things back to their owners.

How long. A listing closes by itself after 60 days (90 for items held by a place), or sooner if you close it. Thirty days after a listing ends, the contact details on it are erased; replies lose theirs after ninety days. To have something removed sooner, close it from your private link or ask us.

Your private link is the key. There are no accounts. Whoever holds the link can read the replies to your listing and close it, so do not share it.

Abuse. To limit spam, the site keeps a scrambled code derived from your connection - not your IP address, and changed every day - to count how many listings and replies come from one place in an hour. Listings reported three times are taken down until someone looks at them.

Email. If email is set up, a short notice is sent when someone replies to your listing, through an email delivery service acting for this site. It carries no contact details of the other person - those are only on your private page.

This follows Ghana’s Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843): the data is collected for one purpose, kept no longer than that purpose needs, and you can ask for it to be corrected or deleted.

Events you send us

Organisers can send an event for the events calendar from the event form. This is what happens to it.

What is public. Nothing, until a person has checked it. Once approved, the event’s name, dates, time, venue, area, organiser, price, link and description are published on the events page, because that is the point of sending it.

What is private. The name, email and phone you leave are for checking the event and for telling you whether it was listed. They are never shown on the site, and only the site’s owner sees them.

Where it is kept. In the same database as lost and found, described above, until the decision; an approved event then becomes part of the events calendar, which is a file in this site’s own code.

How long. Thirty days after your event is approved or turned down, your name, email and phone on it are erased. To have them removed sooner, or the event taken down, ask us.

Email. If email is set up, you are sent a note that the event arrived, and another when it is listed or cannot be, through the same email delivery service as lost and found.

Accra Pulse

Accra Pulse asks questions about the city and shows, on a map, how each district answers. Only people in Greater Accra can vote, and this is exactly what voting involves.

Being asked. Readers whose connection looks like it is in Greater Accra are asked a question now and then on any page of the site - after a while of reading, and as they leave - in a card at the bottom of the screen that one tap closes, and “Don’t ask me again” stops for sixty days. To decide whether to ask, the site asks its host, Vercel, which country, region and town your connection appears to be in. That answer is used for the decision and is not stored; your browser keeps only the decision, for a few hours. It is a guess about the connection, not your location, which is why a vote still needs the check below.

What is counted about the asking. When a question card closes it reports what opened it - a while of reading, leaving, the back button - and what came of it: answered, and how many questions; closed; “not now”; never again; and whether the location check below was asked and how it went. The “Was this guide useful?” prompt under a guide reports the same way: shown, answered or not, and the score. Each report is added to a count for the day and thrown away. It carries nothing about you, your connection or the page you were on. (A score also goes to Google Analytics with the guide it was for, which is how each guide’s score is worked out.)

Your location, once. Before your first vote your browser asks whether this site may know where your phone is. If you allow it, the position - rounded to about a hundred metres before it leaves the phone - is checked against the outlines of Greater Accra’s 29 districts, and what comes back is the name of your district. The position itself is not stored, not logged and not passed on. Your browser keeps the answer, signed so it cannot be edited, for 7 days; then it asks again.

Your vote. Stored with the question, the answer, the district, and when you voted. Your browser keeps a random code so that a second vote from the same phone is a change rather than a new vote; what is stored is a scrambled form of that code, which cannot be turned back into it and is not linked to you, your phone number or anything else. There are no accounts and no names.

What is public. Totals only: how many votes each answer has, across the city and in each district. A district’s answers are shown only once it has 10 votes, so a district where a handful of people voted cannot be read as their answers. No single vote is ever shown, to the public or to the site’s owner.

Where it is kept, and how long. In the same database as lost and found, described above. Individual votes are deleted 30 days after a question closes; the totals stay, because they are the result.

Abuse. Location checks are limited per connection per hour, counted with the same daily-scrambled code lost and found uses - not your IP address. A connection that appears to come from outside Ghana is refused.

Home Ride

Home Ride, the driving game, keeps your driver, your points and your progress in your browser, or in its own accounts if you sign in to it there. When you play it at allaboutaccra.com/drive it also sends this site a few counts about the session, so the site’s owner can see how the game is played:

  • that the game opened, on a phone, a tablet or a computer, whether this browser had played it before, and whether the map of Accra loaded
  • when a drive starts: the Quick Ride or which of the game’s own neighbourhoods, and which vehicle
  • every few minutes while you drive: how long and how far, the coins, jobs, fares and points that added, and how much of it was on autopilot or with the radio on
  • when a shift ends, and whether you shared the picture at the end of it

Nothing in them is about you. No report carries your driver name, an account, a code for your browser, your location or your IP address; the neighbourhood is the one you picked in the game, not where you are. Each report is added into that day’s totals and then thrown away, and the totals are all that is kept and all the owner sees. Reports from one connection are limited per hour, counted for that hour in the server’s memory with the same daily-scrambled code lost and found uses. Played anywhere other than this site, the game sends none.

Accuracy and liability

Everything here is provided in good faith and without warranty.

Ghanaian fees, procedures and legal requirements change, sometimes without announcement, and they vary between offices. The figures on this site carry verification dates and expire on a schedule, which is the best a written guide can do — but the counter is the authority, not this page.

Nothing here is legal, tax, immigration or financial advice. Statutes are cited so you know what to look up and what to point at. Do not rely on this site alone for a decision that matters. If the consequences are serious, pay a professional.

We are not liable for losses arising from anything on this site, including errors, omissions, or figures that were correct when written and are not correct now.

Independence

All About Accra is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for the Government of Ghana or any of its agencies — including the NIA, the GRA, SSNIT, the NHIA, the DVLA, Ghana Immigration Service, the Rent Control Department or the Office of the Registrar of Companies.

Agency names and abbreviations are used descriptively, because those are the names on the buildings.

Guides and glossary entries on this site may be quoted and shared with attribution and a link. Statutes, official forms and government publications referenced here remain the property of their publishers.