Privacy Policy

Bloom Inventory is built by Bloom Technologies, a company registered in Ethiopia with its office at Bole, Addis Ababa. For the processing described here, Bloom Technologies is the data controller — the person who decides the purpose and means of processing, in the language of Article 2 of the Proclamation.

Anything in this policy, including a request to exercise the rights in section 10, should go to info@bloom.et, or by post to Bloom Technologies, Bole, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. You can also reach us on +251 94 156 8544 or +251 92 858 5960.

Three groups of people, in three different relationships with us:

• Visitors to this website.
• People who get in touch — by email, by phone, or by asking for a demonstration.
• Customers of Bloom Inventory — on the web or in the mobile app — and the people whose details appear inside it: their staff, and the customers and suppliers they keep records of.

The third group needs a distinction that the first two do not. When a business uses Bloom Inventory, that business decides what goes into it and why, so that business is the controller of the data inside — and we are its processor, acting on its instructions. We are the controller only of the account, billing and support data we hold about the business itself. Where we act as a processor, the binding terms are in the service agreement with that customer; this policy describes our practice and does not replace it.

Less than you are used to. This website sets no cookies. It runs no analytics, no tag manager, no advertising or social pixels, and no session recording. There is no form on it and no account to create, so there is nothing here for you to submit and nothing that follows you between pages or between sites.

The typefaces are served from this site rather than fetched from a font host while the page loads, so reading a page does not disclose your address to a third party.

What does happen is what happens on any website: the server that delivers these pages keeps a record of the requests it handles. Those records normally hold an IP address, the page asked for, the time, and the browser's user-agent string. They are produced by our hosting provider as part of delivering and protecting the site. We use them to keep it running and to investigate abuse, we do not try to identify visitors from them, and we do not combine them with anything else. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in operating a secure website, under Article 7(2).

The Book a demo button opens a message in your own email program. It sends nothing by itself, and nothing reaches us until you press send. The phone numbers work the same way. The first move is yours in both cases.

Once you do get in touch, we hold what you chose to put in front of us:

• Your name, and the email address or phone number you used.
• Your business, your role, and how many shops or warehouses you run.
• Whatever you tell us about what you use today and what you are trying to fix.
• Our record of the correspondence, including notes from a demonstration or a call.

Article 24 requires us to say whether supplying this is voluntary or compulsory. It is entirely voluntary. There is no field you are obliged to complete, because there is no form. We need a way to reply to you and nothing else is necessary; the rest is what you decided to tell us.

We use it to answer you, to arrange and run the demonstration, and to follow up afterwards. The lawful basis is that the processing is necessary for steps taken at your request before entering a contract, and our legitimate interest in replying to people who contact us. We will not add you to a mailing list off the back of an enquiry; that takes your consent, asked for separately.

Two kinds of data live in the service, and they are governed differently.

Account data

The business name and details, the people you give access to, their names, email addresses and roles, billing records, support requests, and the log of what each user did in the system. We are the controller of this.

Business data

Your products, stock movements, prices, purchases and sales, and the customer, supplier and staff records you enter — including any personal data in them. You are the controller of this. We hold it for you and act on your instructions.

We do not sell any of it. We do not use your business data to advertise to anyone, and we do not mine it to build features for other customers. Where we look at how the service is performing, we use counts and timings that do not identify a business or a person.

Our staff reach customer data only where support or maintenance requires it, under the same role and audit rules described in section 11, and that access is recorded like any other.

The Bloom Inventory app is another way into the same service, so section 5 already covers what you enter in it: the products, sales and records are your business's data, and your sign-in is account data. This section covers what is particular to a phone — what the app asks the phone for, what it keeps on it, and what it sends.

The app carries no analytics, no advertising and no crash reporting, ours or anyone else's, and it does not track you across other apps or websites. It does not use your location, your contacts or your microphone. It talks to our servers, and to Expo only if you turn alerts on. It syncs only while it is open.

It asks for each permission the first time you use the feature that needs it, not when it opens. You can refuse any of them, or withdraw one later in your phone's settings; that feature stops working and the rest of the app carries on.

Camera

For scanning barcodes and the clock station's code, and for photographing a payment slip. A scan keeps only the code it reads; the camera's picture is not saved or sent. A slip photo is sent only when you press Use photo, and since the app has no access to your location, the photo cannot be tagged with one.

Photos

For attaching a photo you already have — a bank slip, a mobile-money screenshot — to a payment. The app shows your recent photos so that you can pick one. Only the photo you pick is sent, and the app never saves anything to your photo library.

Payment slips

A slip you attach, from the camera or from your photos, is made smaller and sent to our servers, where it is kept with the payment as part of your business's records. If the payment is never saved, the photo is deleted after 24 hours.

NFC

For clocking in and out by holding your phone to the clock station. The two phones exchange the station's current code, which changes every 20 seconds, and nothing about you. Your phone sends that code to us with whether you are clocking in or out, and the punch is recorded with the station and the time. That record is your employer's attendance data. Your location is not part of it.

Face ID, fingerprint or passcode

Asked for to confirm it is you before a phone is made a clock station. Your phone does the check and tells the app only whether it passed. The app never receives your face, fingerprint or passcode, and the result is not stored or sent.

Clock stations

A phone set up as a clock station sends us its name — the one set in the phone's settings, or else its model — so that your business can tell its stations apart. Its screen stays on while the station is open.

Alerts

Off until you turn them on in Settings. When you do, Expo, the service that delivers our notifications, issues your phone a push token — an address for alerts — and the app sends it to us with the phone's name and whether it runs Android or iOS. An alert carries a title and a short message, such as a payment received, stock running low, an approval waiting or a payslip ready, and can name a customer, a colleague or an amount. Expo passes it to Apple or Google, who deliver it to the phone. Turning alerts off, or signing out, removes the token.

On the phone

So that it works without a connection, the app keeps a copy of your business's records on the phone, including the contact details of its customers, suppliers and staff. The copy is held in an encrypted database, and its key and your sign-in are kept in the phone's secure storage. Sales made offline, and slip photos attached to them, wait on the phone until they can be sent.

Signing out

Signing out from Settings ends your session and deletes the copy of your business's records, its keys and the push token from the phone. Anything recorded offline that has not been sent yet is lost with it, so let the app sync first. Your language and appearance choices stay. The steps for deleting your account altogether are on our Delete account page, linked at the foot of this one.

The assistant

If your business switches the assistant on, what you type to it is sent to Anthropic, the AI provider that writes its replies. Only the conversation is sent; the assistant cannot look anything up in your business's records. The conversation is not saved on the phone.

Device details

Apart from the phone's name in the two cases above, the app sends no device identifiers. Your sessions record the IP address they came from and the software that made the request, as any sign-in does.

Article 7(2) lists the grounds on which personal data may be processed at all. We rely on four of them:

Contract

Providing the service, supporting it, invoicing for it — and the steps taken at your request before any of that, such as answering an enquiry or running a demonstration.

Legitimate interests

Keeping the website and the service secure, preventing and investigating abuse, and keeping a record of our dealings with customers. We rely on this only where your rights and interests do not override it.

Legal obligation

Tax, accounting and company records we are required to keep, and disclosures a law or a competent authority requires of us.

Consent

Where we ask for it specifically and separately — alerts on your phone, a mailing list, a case study, a quotation with your name on it. You can withdraw consent at any time by writing to us, or for alerts by turning them off, and withdrawing it does not make what we did beforehand unlawful.

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. A small number of providers see it in order to do the job we engaged them for:

• The cloud infrastructure providers that host this website and run the service.
• The provider that carries our email.
• Expo, which relays the app's alerts to Apple and Google for delivery, for anyone who turns alerts on.
• Anthropic, which writes the assistant's replies, for businesses that switch the assistant on. It receives only what is typed to the assistant.
• Payment and accounting providers, for invoicing and for the records tax law requires.
• Professional advisers — lawyers, auditors — under a duty of confidence, where a matter requires it.

We may also disclose data where a law, a court or a competent authority requires it. Where that happens we disclose what is required and no more.

This next part matters most to an Ethiopian business, so it is worth stating plainly rather than burying. The infrastructure hosting this website and the Bloom Inventory service is operated by cloud providers whose data centres are outside Ethiopia. Personal data processed through the service is therefore transferred out of the country.

Articles 18 to 20 govern that transfer. It may be made to a jurisdiction that ensures an appropriate level of protection, or on one of the other grounds in Article 20 — including explicit consent given after the risk has been explained, and necessity for the performance of a contract. We rely on contractual data protection terms with each provider, and on the transfer being necessary to provide a service you have asked us for.

Article 22 goes further: it requires personal data collected in Ethiopia to be stored on a server or data centre located in Ethiopia, and makes any cross-border transfer of sensitive personal data subject to the Authority's prior approval. We treat that as a live obligation and our hosting arrangements are under review against it. If your data needs to stay in Ethiopia, raise it with us before you start and we will tell you straight whether we can do it yet.

Article 15 allows personal data to be kept for the period needed to achieve the purpose, or the period a law sets. In practice:

Server logs

A short rolling window — weeks rather than months — then overwritten.

Enquiries that go nowhere

Up to 24 months from our last contact, so that we have the context if you come back to us, then deleted.

Customer account and business data

For the life of the agreement. On termination we return or delete it on the timetable set in the service agreement.

Payment slips never used

A photo uploaded for a payment that is then not saved is deleted after 24 hours.

The copy on a phone

Until you sign out of the app from Settings, which deletes it. Section 6 says what that covers.

Records the law requires

Tax, accounting and company records for the period the relevant law sets, regardless of the above.

The Proclamation gives you the following rights over data about you. You exercise them by writing to info@bloom.et.

Access — Article 25

Confirmation of whether we process data about you, a copy in an intelligible form, where we got it, and how long we intend to hold it.

Rectification — Article 27

Correction of data that is wrong or incomplete.

Erasure — Article 28

Deletion where the data is no longer needed for its purpose, where you withdraw the consent it rested on, where you object successfully, or where it was processed unlawfully.

Objection — Article 29

You may object in writing at any time. We must stop unless we have compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests, rights and freedoms.

Restriction — Article 30

Data marked so that it is not processed further while a dispute about its accuracy or lawfulness is being resolved.

Portability — Article 32

Your data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, and transmitted to another controller where that is technically feasible.

Automated decisions — Article 31

The right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that produces legal effects for you. See section 12 — we do not make any.

The Proclamation requires us to act without excessive delay rather than inside a fixed number of days. We aim to answer substantively within 30 days, and if a request will take longer we will tell you that and why before the 30 days are up. There is no charge. We may need to satisfy ourselves that you are who you say you are before we act, particularly on a request to access or delete.

To have your Bloom Inventory account deleted, follow the steps on our Delete account page, linked at the foot of this one. It also sets out what is deleted, what is kept, and for how long.

One case is worth separating out. If data about you is in Bloom Inventory because a business you deal with put it there — you are their customer, their supplier or their employee — then that business is the controller and the request belongs with them, not with us. Send it to them. If it reaches us instead, we will tell you who to ask and let them know it arrived.

The protections we rely on are the ones the product is built out of rather than a layer added over the top:

• Data is scoped to a single business below the application, so a fault in a screen cannot return another business's records.
• Access is granted by role, per resource and per action.
• Every request is recorded with who made it and what it changed.
• Records are never edited in place — a correction is a new entry, so tampering leaves a trace instead of replacing one.
• Traffic to this site and to the service is encrypted in transit.
• The copy of your data that the app keeps on a phone is encrypted, with a key held in the phone's secure storage.

If a breach happens, Article 43 requires us to notify the Authority within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, and Article 44 requires us to tell the people affected within 72 hours as well. We will do both, and we will say what we know rather than waiting until the picture is complete.

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim that this one is.

Bloom Inventory suggests reorder quantities and flags slow, dead and expiring stock. Those are calculations about goods, drawn from sales history and supplier lead times, and a person decides what to do about them. We make no decisions about people by automated means, and nothing in the service produces a legal effect for an individual or anything similarly significant. We do not profile visitors to this website at all — section 3 explains why there would be nothing to profile them with.

Bloom Inventory is a tool for businesses and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18 through this website or the app. If you believe we hold any, write to us and we will delete it.

If you think we have handled your data wrongly, tell us first. Most things are quicker to put right directly, and we would rather hear it from you.

You also have the right to complain to the supervisory authority, and you do not have to come to us first. Under the Proclamation the Ethiopian Communications Authority oversees personal data protection: it keeps the register of controllers and processors, investigates complaints, and can impose sanctions. Article 58 requires a complaint to be made in writing. The Authority investigates and notifies you of the outcome in writing within 21 days, and its decision may be appealed to the Federal High Court within 60 days.

When this policy changes, the date at the top of it changes. Where a change materially affects how we handle data we already hold, we will tell affected customers directly rather than leaving it to you to notice.