Privacy Policy

Sakina سكينة — Privacy Policy

Effective 4 September 2026 · Volta (TRAAC), Cairo, Egypt · app.sakina.care · العربية

1 · Who operates Sakina

Sakina is published and operated by Volta (TRAAC), Cairo, Egypt ("we", "us"). Contact: [email protected].

This policy covers the Sakina mobile application (iOS and Android, bundle identifier app.sakina.care), the Sakina therapist console, and the service both of them talk to.

2 · What Sakina is, and what it is not

Sakina is practice-management software for a therapist, plus a client app that rides on a therapeutic relationship that already exists offline. It is not a consumer therapy app: there is no matching, no anonymous counselling, no chatbot therapy and no advice from us. Your therapist is your therapist; the app is her diary, her notes and her invoice book, and your view of the parts that concern you.

Roles:

• The practice and its therapists are the controllers of the clinical record. They are the clinicians; they own the duty of confidentiality and the record.
• We are their processor. We store and move that record on their instructions. We do not read clinical notes, we do not use them to train anything, and we cannot decrypt them from outside the service.

3 · Health data — stated first because it is the whole file

Nearly everything Sakina holds about a client is data concerning health, and specifically mental-health data, under Egyptian Law 151 of 2018 and its equivalents. That includes the fact that you are in therapy at all, which is itself sensitive. We handle it as follows:

• Session notes are encrypted before they are stored, with a versioned key. They are stored as ciphertext; the service does not hold them in readable form.
• Every read and every edit of a note is written to an audit trail — which account, what action, when, and the network address. A clinical record nobody can audit is not a clinical record.
• Clients are identified by an alias, not a name, in the parts of the system that move clinical data around. Scheduling data leaves the server with no name attached to it at all.
• A practice can only ever see its own clients. This is enforced on every read, and it fails closed: a request that cannot prove which practice it belongs to returns nothing rather than everything.
• Nothing is sold, rented, shared for advertising, or used to train a model — ever, under any circumstance.

4 · The crisis list

The app carries a list of Egyptian emergency and crisis numbers — ambulance, police, the mental-health hotline, the addiction hotline, and a listening line — and it is reachable without signing in, because a person in crisis should not have to remember a password.

That list is the same for everyone. It contains nothing about you, it is served without authentication precisely so that it cannot contain anything about you, and tapping it is not recorded against your account. The app does not ask what is wrong, does not score you, and does not decide which number you need. It shows the doors and gets out of the way.

Calling a number from the list places an ordinary telephone call on your own device. Sakina is not part of that call, does not hear it and does not know it happened. The organisation you call has its own privacy practices, which we do not control.

5 · What the service holds

What	Why	Kept
Practice: name, code, time zone	To separate one practice's records from every other practice's	For the life of the subscription
Therapist: mobile number, a one-way hash of the password, display name, stated credentials, licence number, hourly fee	To sign her in, to show a client who is treating her, and to price a session	While the account is active
Client: an alias chosen by the practice, mobile number and password hash if the client uses the app, date of birth, emergency contact, current risk level, and whether intake is complete	To identify a client without spreading her name through the system, to reach someone if she is at risk, and to schedule and bill	See section 8 — clinical retention
Sessions: start time, length, state, fee, whether it is paid	The diary and the invoice	See section 8
Session notes, encrypted: the ciphertext, its initialisation vector, the key version, the format, whether a draft was machine- assisted, and whether the therapist has signed it	The clinical record. Signing fixes it; a signed note is the therapist's statement of what happened	See section 8
Note audit: which account opened or changed which note, when, and from what address	Confidentiality is only real if a breach of it leaves a trace	Ten years
Mood entries: a score and an optional line of text, with the time	So change between sessions is visible to the client and her therapist	See section 8
Homework: title, text, due date, completion	What was agreed between sessions	See section 8
Risk events: level, where the concern came from, the detail, when it was escalated, when it was resolved, and what was done	This is the most serious thing in the product. A concern about self-harm has to reach a named human being and be seen to have been acted on	See section 8
Payments: amount in Egyptian pounds, the processor, its reference, the state, and a checkout link	To take and reconcile a session fee	Seven years, as commercial records
Device and sign-in tokens	To keep you signed in and to cut off a lost device	Until expiry

6 · Payments

We never see your card. Where a practice collects a fee through the app, the payment is processed by Paymob: the card details are entered on Paymob's own page, on Paymob's systems, under Paymob's privacy policy. What reaches us is the amount, the processor's reference and whether the payment succeeded. There is no card number, no expiry date and no security code anywhere in Sakina.

7 · What Sakina does not do

• No advertising identifier, no advertising, no data broker, and no third-party advertising or analytics SDK in the app. A mental-health app with an advertising SDK is a betrayal, not a business model.
• No location, no contact list, no calendar, no SMS, no call log, no microphone recording of sessions.
• No sale, rental or sharing of clinical data — not with insurers, not with employers, not with researchers, not in aggregate, not de-identified, not for any price.
• No use of notes, mood entries or risk events to train any model.
• No diagnosis and no advice from the software. Sakina records care; it does not deliver it.

8 · How long clinical records are kept

A clinical record is not ours to discard on request, and a therapist has her own professional and legal duty to retain it. So:

• Clinical records — notes, risk events, sessions, mood entries, homework — are retained for as long as the treating practice is required to retain them, and for at least ten years from the last session, or, for a client who was a minor, ten years from the client's eighteenth birthday.
• The practice, not we, decides earlier deletion where the law allows it.
• Access data, tokens and devices are deleted when the account closes.
• Payment records are kept for seven years as commercial records.

9 · Your rights, and how to use them

• To see your record, ask your therapist. She holds it and she is the person who can explain it. Egyptian law gives you access rights; a clinician may withhold a part where disclosure would cause serious harm, and she must tell you if she does.
• To delete your app account — write to [email protected] from the number on the account with the word delete in the subject, or ask your therapist. Your sign-in, device and tokens are removed within thirty days, and your view of the record ends. The clinical record itself remains with the practice for the retention period above; we say so plainly rather than promising a deletion no clinician may lawfully perform.
• To correct something that is factually wrong, tell your therapist. A signed clinical note is amended by adding a correction, not by overwriting history — that is how clinical records work everywhere.
• To complain, write to us, or to the Egyptian Personal Data Protection Centre established under Law 151 of 2018.

10 · Legal basis

• Clinical data — processed for the provision of health care by, or under the responsibility of, a professional bound by a duty of confidentiality, on the documented instructions of the practice, and with the client's explicit consent to use the app.
• Risk events — the vital interests of the client, and the clinician's duty of care. A concern about self-harm is acted on whether or not consent is convenient at that moment.
• Scheduling and billing — performance of the contract for treatment, and a legal obligation to keep commercial records.
• Account and security data — our legitimate interest in a service that cannot be quietly taken over.

11 · Who else sees it

• Your therapist and, where the practice is more than one person, the practice administrator — for scheduling and billing. An administrator is a practice administrator, never an operator of the whole platform, and cannot reach another practice's clients.
• Paymob, for the payment itself.
• Our hosting provider, for the servers and the database.
• Apple and Google, as the stores that distribute the app.
• Nobody else, except where a valid Egyptian legal order compels disclosure, or where a clinician's own legal duty to prevent serious harm requires her to act.

12 · How it is protected

• Notes are encrypted at rest with a versioned key and stored only as ciphertext.
• Passwords are one-way hashes, unreadable by anyone including us.
• Every clinical read is checked against the practice boundary and fails closed — a missing or unprovable practice returns nothing.
• Every note access is written to an audit trail with the network address.
• Booking, rescheduling and cancelling are idempotent on a device-generated key enforced by the database, so a phone that retries on a bad connection cannot create a second appointment.
• Traffic is encrypted in transit; access to production data is limited to the people who operate the service and is logged.

If a breach affects clinical data we notify the affected practice and the affected people directly, and the Egyptian authority where the law requires it, without undue delay.

13 · Children

Sakina is not directed at children, and a client account is created by a practice, not by self-registration. Where a practice treats a minor, it is responsible for obtaining the consent of the parent or guardian under Egyptian law before the child uses the app, and for the longer retention period in section 8. We do not knowingly allow a child to open an account unaided.

13 · How to reach us

Questions about this policy, a request to see, correct, export or delete your data, or a complaint about how Sakina handles it — write to [email protected] and put the word Sakina in the subject line. We answer within thirty days.

Postal and in-person contact: Volta (TRAAC), Cairo, Egypt.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may complain to the Egyptian Personal Data Protection Centre established under Law 151 of 2018.

14 · Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect, why we collect it, or who we share it with, we publish the new version at this address and change the effective date at the top. A change that materially widens what we collect is announced inside the app before it takes effect, and — where the law requires consent — asked for rather than assumed. This page is the whole policy; there is no second document.