Most platforms tell you they take privacy seriously. This page tells you the specific decisions we made, what each one protects, and where the protection stops.
When you photograph an identity document, the text is extracted by a recognition engine running on Walya’s own servers in Ethiopia. It is never uploaded to Google, Amazon, Microsoft or any other foreign service for processing. This is the single most sensitive moment in the whole system, and it is the one we refuse to outsource.
Distances, journey times and the map you look at are produced by routing software and OpenStreetMap data we host ourselves. No foreign mapping company receives a record of where you were picked up or where you were going.
Your name, phone number and document details are encrypted by the application itself, before they reach the database. The stored rows are ciphertext. A stolen disk, a stolen backup or a copied snapshot yields unreadable data rather than a readable copy of your life.
The platform runs on infrastructure inside Ethiopia. This is an architectural commitment, not a configuration setting — there is no hosted cloud service holding a copy to switch back to.
A vehicle’s registration is checked by comparing photographs of its front and rear plates against its bollo certificate. The number the owner typed into a form is not what gets trusted.
Public registration is deliberately switched off at two independent layers while the platform completes its security review. It is why this site asks you to join a list instead of creating an account — a closed door is a control, not an oversight.
Encryption applied before storage defends against someone obtaining the stored data — a disk taken from a rack, a copied backup, a snapshot of a server. It is a strong protection and a bounded one. No platform, including this one, can promise that no attack of any kind will ever succeed, and a company that tells you otherwise is either mistaken or selling something.
What we can promise is that we do not create the easy failures: your identity documents are not shipped to a foreign processor, your movements are not handed to an overseas mapping company, and your personal details are not sitting in a database in plain text waiting to be read.
No. Your data is used to run the services you ask for. It is not sold, and it is not handed to advertising or analytics companies abroad — which is also why the site you are reading loads no third-party trackers.
It is protected in specific, describable ways rather than absolutely. Encryption applied before storage means stolen disks, backups and snapshots are unreadable. It does not make any system immune to every possible attack, and we would rather tell you exactly what the protection covers than claim a perfection no platform can honestly offer.
You, the provider carrying out the job, and Walya staff who need the record to resolve a dispute or meet a legal obligation. Access by staff is logged against the person who made it.
They are retained encrypted for as long as the law requires us to be able to demonstrate that a driver or vehicle was verified, and no longer. The detail is set out in the Privacy Policy.
Because loading them would send your IP address and the page you are reading to a foreign company on every visit. A site that argues for data sovereignty while quietly leaking its visitors would not be worth reading.
The Privacy Policy sets out precisely what is collected, why, how long it is kept, and how to ask for a copy or a deletion.