01If you received a WhatsApp message through Mlango
To stop receiving messages, reply STOP or ACHA to any message from that business. You will be excluded from its campaigns and reminders straight away.
To have your data deleted:
- Email habari@mlango.co.tz with the subject Delete my data.
- Include the phone number that received the messages, and if you can, the name of the business that messaged you.
- We will confirm by replying to you, or by a WhatsApp message to that number, that the request really comes from the owner of the number.
We delete your number, name, the messages sent to you and your replies from the accounts of the businesses that contacted you through Mlango, and we tell those businesses that we have done so. You can also ask the business directly — it can delete your contact from its own Mlango account.
02If you have a Mlango account
- Email habari@mlango.co.tz from the email address registered on your account, with the subject Delete my Mlango account.
- Tell us whether you want any remaining wallet balance refunded, and to which mobile-money number or bank account.
- We may ask you to confirm the request by signing in, to make sure nobody else is closing your account.
We then close the account, disconnect your WhatsApp numbers from Mlango, and delete your profile, contacts, groups, templates, campaigns, messages, Inbox conversations and uploaded files.
03What we have to keep
A few records cannot be deleted immediately because the law requires us to keep them:
- Financial records — top-ups, charges and refunds — for as long as Tanzanian tax and accounting law requires (generally five years). These are kept separately and are not used for anything else.
- A record that a phone number opted out, so that it is never messaged again by mistake.
- Information needed to resolve a dispute or comply with a lawful request from an authority, for as long as that lasts.
Delivery statistics may be kept in a form that no longer identifies anyone.
04How long it takes
We acknowledge every request within 7 days and complete it within 30 days. Copies in our encrypted backups are overwritten in the normal backup cycle, within a further 30 days.
Messages already delivered to your phone stay in your WhatsApp app — delete them there if you wish. Meta keeps its own records under its own policy.
05Questions
Write to habari@mlango.co.tz. If you are unhappy with how we handled your request, you can complain to the Personal Data Protection Commission (Tume ya Ulinzi wa Taarifa Binafsi) of Tanzania. Read our full privacy policy.