Privacy Notice
How Athletes of Kenya handles personal data on this Site.
Who we are
This website, https://aok.co.ke (the “Site”), is operated by Mark Laai, trading as Great Athletes of Kenya (“AoK”, “we”, “us”, “our”). Great Athletes of Kenya is a registered sole proprietorship in Kenya, registration No. BN-8MC2D28L. Mark Laai is the owner, founder, and the current sole person working in the business.
You can contact us about this notice, or about your personal data, at:
- Email: hello@aok.co.ke
- Post: Athletes of Kenya, Coffee Garden Drive, Muthaiga North, Nairobi, Kenya
Scope of this notice
This notice explains how we handle personal data in connection with the Site: when you browse it, when you contact us, and where the Site publishes historical information about identifiable people (athletes). It does not cover the practices of any third-party site we link to.AoK is presently a small Kenyan sports-history, athlete-data, and publishing platform. It does not currently operate user accounts, a payment or checkout system, or any advertising or analytics service. Where this notice describes something as "not currently active," that reflects the state of the Site at the time of writing and will be updated if that changes.Information you submit directly to us
Contact form
The Site's Contact page includes a form with the following fields:| Field | Required? |
|---|---|
| First name | Required |
| Last name | Optional |
| Telephone number | Optional |
| Email address | Required |
| Message | Required |
When you submit this form, the details you provide are sent to us so that we can read and respond to your enquiry — for example, a correction, a research request, a partnership enquiry, or a general question. Submitting the contact form does not sign you up to a newsletter, mailing list, or any other form of marketing; we do not currently operate one.
"Notify me" requests
Certain not-yet-available product pages (for example, forthcoming publications in the Shop section) offer a "Notify me" option. If you use it, your name and email address are prepared into a draft email addressed to us, which your own device then opens in your own email application. We only receive that information if you choose to send that draft yourself; the Site does not transmit it to us directly.What we do not currently collect
We do not currently ask you to create an account, do not process payments or orders, and do not use a consent checkbox for ordinary contact enquiries — we consider one unnecessary for a straightforward request-and-response contact process, though this is kept under review.Public athlete and historical information
A core part of the Site is a public historical archive of Kenyan sporting participation, including Olympic and Paralympic Games. For named athletes, this can include: full name, gender, sporting discipline(s), competition appearances and results, medals, and — where available — dates and places of birth and, where applicable, dates of death.This information concerns identifiable people, some of whom are living and some of whom are deceased. We treat it as follows:- It is compiled from historical and sporting records, not collected from the athletes themselves, and not submitted by them through this Site.
- We do not treat public availability of information elsewhere as removing our own responsibility to be accurate, proportionate, and open to correction. See our Corrections Policy and Research and Sources Policy for how we source, verify, and correct this material.
- We take particular care around minors, disputed details, unsupported claims, sensitive information, and information about living people, applying extra scrutiny before publishing or retaining such details.
- Full dates (rather than year-only) may be published where available, relevant to the historical record, reliably sourced, and proportionate — assessed on the individual circumstances of each record, not applied as a blanket rule.
- If you are an athlete, an authorised representative, or a relative or next-of-kin of a deceased athlete, and you have a concern about how you or a family member is described, please see our Corrections Policy for how to raise it.
Technical and server information
Like virtually any website, visiting the Site causes ordinary technical information to be generated and processed as a normal part of how the internet works — for example, your IP address, browser and device information, the pages you request, and referring links. This happens at the web server level, through our hosting provider, Hostinger, and is not something this Site's own code separately collects, stores, or analyses (we do not run any analytics or tracking script — see the Cookies section below).Hostinger may maintain server, security, or access logs as part of providing hosting infrastructure and keeping it secure. We do not have further confirmed detail about the exact retention period or processing region(s) involved to share here beyond what is set out in the International Processing section below.Why we process personal data, and on what basis
| Processing activity | Purpose | Our position on the applicable basis |
|---|---|---|
| Responding to contact-form enquiries | Answering questions, corrections, research and partnership requests | We process this because you have asked us to, at your own request, and because we have a legitimate interest in operating a functioning contact channel for the Site. |
| Steps towards a potential contract | Where an enquiry (for example, about data services or a future paid product) may lead to an agreement with us | We process the details needed to take steps you have requested before entering into a contract. |
| Publishing historical athlete data | Historical, statistical, educational, and editorial archive of Kenyan sport | We rely on our legitimate interests in historical, statistical, educational, and editorial publishing, weighed against the individual’s own interests and rights on a record-by-record basis. We do not treat “public interest” as an automatic, standalone basis that applies identically to every entry regardless of its content. |
| Server/technical logs via Hostinger | Operating, protecting, and troubleshooting the Site | We, and our hosting provider, have a legitimate interest in keeping the Site running, secure, and free of abuse. |
Who we share information with
Zoho (email delivery)
Contact-form submissions are relayed by authenticated SMTP through Zoho to our mailbox, hello@aok.co.ke. Zoho acts as our email service provider for this purpose.Hostinger (hosting)
Hostinger hosts the Site's files and serves it to visitors, including running the contact-form mail script.No other third parties
We do not currently share personal data with any advertising, analytics, or marketing service, because we do not operate one. If that changes, this notice will be updated first.Cookies and similar technologies
Current position: this Site does not set any cookies, does not use browser local/session storage or IndexedDB for tracking, and does not load any third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking script. The fonts used on the Site are hosted directly by us rather than loaded from a third party, precisely so that visiting the Site does not send your browsing information to an external font provider.
Because no optional or non-essential cookies or tracking technologies are in use, we do not currently show a cookie consent banner — there is nothing to ask your consent for. We do not maintain a separate, long-form Cookie Policy at this time, since this section reflects our complete current position. If we introduce cookies, analytics, or similar technology in future, we will update this notice — and add consent mechanisms and a fuller Cookie Policy — before doing so, not after.International processing
Our email provider (Zoho) and hosting provider (Hostinger) are both international service providers. We tell you honestly that they may process personal data submitted through the contact form, or generated as technical/server data, outside Kenya. We are not in a position to confirm the exact country or countries involved, and we do not claim that data is kept exclusively within Kenya, is encrypted end-to-end, or is anonymised.How long we keep information
- Contact-form enquiries are ordinarily retained for up to 24 months after the last meaningful interaction with you, unless we need to keep them for longer — for example, because they relate to a contract, a transaction, a dispute, a financial record, an investigation, or another legal obligation.
- Public athlete and historical data is retained as part of an ongoing historical archive and is not subject to a fixed deletion date, though it remains subject to correction and the safeguards described above.
Security
We take reasonable, proportionate steps appropriate to a small publishing platform to protect information submitted to us — for example, our contact-form script strips characters that could be used to inject forged email headers, and never displays technical error detail to visitors. However, we do not claim that any method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security of information you send us over the internet.Your rights and how to raise a request
Depending on the applicable law, you may have rights to access, correct, object to, restrict, or request deletion of personal data we hold about you. In plain terms, this means you can ask us: what do you hold about me; please fix something that’s wrong; please stop using my data in a particular way; or please delete what you hold about me. This is different from a request to correct or remove information published as part of the historical athlete archive — see the section above and our Corrections Policy for that separate process.
To make a request about your own personal data (for example, a contact-form submission you made), contact hello@aok.co.ke. We aim to acknowledge requests promptly and respond as quickly as we reasonably can.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you may also raise a complaint with Kenya’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC).
Minors
The Site is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children through the contact form. Where the historical archive includes athletes who competed as minors, we apply the extra care described above. If you believe a child’s personal data has been submitted to us without appropriate consent, please contact hello@aok.co.ke.Links to other websites
The Site links to external sources (for example, official federation or historical-record websites) and to AoK's own social media profiles. Once you leave the Site, this notice no longer applies, and we are not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites.Changes to this notice
We may update this notice from time to time, including as our processing activities, service providers, or applicable law change. We will update the version and effective date shown at the top of this page when we do.Contact us
Questions about this notice, or about your personal data, can be sent to:- Email: hello@aok.co.ke
- Post: Athletes of Kenya, Coffee Garden Drive, Muthaiga North, Nairobi, Kenya