Privacy Policy

Development Watch Center

Privacy Policy

Date Last Updated: February 11, 2026

Development Watch Center (referred to throughout this policy as “DWC,” “we,” and “our”) cares about your privacy and the security of your information. This policy details our practices in connection with our print, digital, and live event products and services, including the DWC magazine, our website, our lications, newsletters, and any other content we provide (collectively, the “Services”) as they relate to your data. It describes the kinds of personal information we gather about you in connection with the Services, how we use that information, to whom we disclose it, and how you can manage it.

 

By using our Services, you accept the practices described in this Privacy Policy, including our use of cookies and similar online tools. If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy, please do not use our Services.

 

Our services are constantly under development, which may cause our data practices to change from time to time. We will update this policy with any changes we make, so please visit this page often to stay current. Any changes to this policy will become effective as of the date “last updated” noted above. Your continued use of our Services following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.

 

If you are located in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, or Switzerland, please see the Additional Information for Users in Europe and the United Kingdom section of this policy.

 

Table of Contents

  • 1. Information Collected
  • 2. How We Use Your Information
  • 3. How We Share Your Information
  • 4. How Long Your Information Is Stored
  • 5. Tracking Technologies and Privacy Choices
  • 6. Statement on No Children’s Data
  • 7. Contact Us
  • 8. Additional Information for Users in Europe and the United Kingdom

 

  1. Information Collected

Information You May Provide

When you use our Services, you may voluntarily provide us with certain pieces of information about yourself, including the following.

 

Contact Information – When you create an account on our website, subscribe to the magazine, or participate in one of our surveys or contests, we ask you for your contact information, which may include your name, email address, phone number, and physical address.

 

Billing Information – When you purchase one of our products or register for certain live events we collect your billing information, which may include your name, email address, and billing address. While you may enter your credit or debit card information on a DWC website, we do not have direct access to or possession of that information beyond the last four digits of your card. Instead, a third-party payment processor is responsible for the processing and storing your payment information.

 

Demographic information – When you register for a live event or participate in one of our surveys we may ask you to tell us more about yourself, such as your job title and level, the name of your employer, the industry in which you work, your household income, your age, your race or ethnicity, or your gender. Some of this information may be considered sensitive personal information under applicable laws. Questions inquiring about your sensitive information are always optional.

 

Communication Information – We collect information about you when you communicate with us, such as by contacting our Customer Care team, including the content of the communication and any contact information you provide.

 

Business Information – If you have a professional relationship with DWC we may collect information such as your job title, employer’s name and contact information, and your business email address, physical address, and telephone number.

 

Profile Information – When you create or use an account on our Services, we may collect information such as your username, password, photographs, interests, preferences, and any other information you choose to provide. When you link an existing account from a third-party platform, we may additionally collect information such as that account’s ID information and associated preferences.

 

User-Generated Information – If you elect to participate in Discussions, please be aware that all comments are viewable by the general public and typically cannot be deleted once published. We encourage you to be cautious about any personal information you include in your comments. DWC has no responsibility for nor control over how others may use the information you publicly disclose.

 

Information Collected Automatically

By default, we automatically collect certain pieces of information about you when you use our Services, including the following. Much of this information is collected via cookies, pixels, and other tracking technologies. Please review Section 5 of this policy to learn more about how they function and how to turn them off.

 

Device Information – This lets us know how you are accessing our Services and includes information such as the kind of device you are using, your operating system, your browser, your mobile carrier, certain device settings, referral URLs, your IP address and other unique device identifiers.

 

Usage Information – This lets us know how you are interacting with our Services and includes information such as which parts of the Services you visit (e.g. page views and mouse clicks), how long you visit, your search history within our Services, and how you interacted with advertisements and emails. Usage information also includes how you participate in Discussions, such as your comment, recommendation, and moderation history.

 

Location Information – As previously mentioned, we collect your device’s IP address when you use our Services. Your IP address may disclose or allow us to infer the general location of your device at the time you access the Services.

 

Inferred Information – In order to better understand our user base, we may infer some information about you, such as your age, gender, education level, and household composition, based on your survey responses.

 

Information Collected from Third Parties

Other Individuals – We may receive personal information about you from other individuals such as when someone purchases you a gift subscription to the DWC magazine.

 

Social Media and Other Third-Party Platforms – If you interact with our pages or accounts on social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.), we may collect personal information about you available on that platform. This includes your social media account ID, username, user ID, profile picture, cover photo, networks to which you belong, friends, connections, and contact information. Additionally, you may choose to log-in to our Services using your account on certain social media or other third-party platforms. If you do so, we and that platform share certain information about you and your activities, including but not limited to page visits and mouse clicks on our Services. You can read more about your choices with regards to data sharing in Section 5 of this policy.

 

Publicly or Commercially Available Sources – We may obtain contact details and other personal information of media contacts and influencers from a variety of publicly or commercially available sources/databases.

 

  1. How We Use Your Information

We use your information for the purposes described below.

 

Providing the Services – Your personal information helps us to provide you with our Services such as giving you access to the Services, fulfilling your subscription, maintaining your account, processing your payments, providing you with customer support, and allowing you to participate in sweepstakes, contests, or other promotions.

 

Personalizing the Services – Your personal information allows us to give you a customized experience with our Services including offering you content recommendations, promotions, and advertisements that are more relevant to you.

 

Communicating with You – Your personal information, such as your contact details, allows us to communicate with you in a variety of ways. We may send you the DWC magazine, newsletters, and updates; inform you about content, products, and promotions that may be of interest; provide you with invoices and payment reminders; send you surveys and other research material; and provide you with customer support.

 

Advertising – We use your personal information to deliver advertisements that are of interest to you, both on our own behalf and on that of third parties. We also use this information to measure the effectiveness of a given ad campaign (for example, by measuring the number of unique viewers for that advertisement). To find out more about your personalized advertising choices, please review Section 5 of this policy. We may also email you on behalf of our advertisers or event underwriters to inform you about their products or services and offers that may be of interest. You can opt out of such communication at any time by emailing us at info@dwcug.org or contacting our Customer Care team as detailed in Section 8 below.

 

Social Media – We may use your personal information, including information provided to us by social media or other third-party platforms to enable you to log into our Services, to connect your social media account to our Services, or to enable you to interact with our social media accounts and activity. We may also use your information to help us determine what content or advertising to deliver to you on those social media platforms.

 

Analytics, Research, and Development – We use your personal information, including information that may be considered sensitive, to learn more about who uses our Services and how they use it. This helps us to make business and marketing decisions, improve our current products and develop new ones that will be of interest to you.

 

Maintenance & Security – We use your personal information to assist us in maintaining and securing our Services, including evaluating our security systems, debugging, detecting security incidents, preventing malicious, fraudulent, and illegal activity, enforcing our terms of service, and protecting the rights and safety of DWC and others.

 

Compliance with Law – We may use your personal information when we believe it is necessary to enforce our Terms & Conditions, Terms of Sale, or to comply with laws and regulations.

 

  1. How We Share Your Information

We share your personal information with third parties. In general, the reasons we share your information falls into one or more of the following categories.

 

Service Providers – We share some of your personal information with service providers who perform functions on our behalf to help us to offer our Services and manage our business. This includes:

  • Processing payments
  • Fulfilling purchase orders
  • Managing email communications
  • Providing customer service
  • Storing data
  • Building and distributing surveys
  • Conducting research and development
  • Running analytics
  • Serving advertisements and measuring their performance
  • Maintaining the safety and security of our Services

 

Content or Advertising Partners – Third parties that provide content, advertising, or functionality to the Services collect or receive information about you and/or your use of the Services, including through the use of cookies, pixels, and similar technologies (please review Section 5 of this policy to learn more). These third parties use your information to provide you with advertising that is based on your interests; to measure and analyze ad performance on our Services or other websites or platforms; and combine it with information collected across different websites, online services, and other devices. These third parties’ use of your information will be based on their own privacy policies.

 

Event Partners and Underwriters – When you register for or attend one of our live events, we may share some of your registration information, such as your email address, with our event partners or underwriters. They may use this information to let you know about their products and services. We will only share your information with your permission and you can opt out at any time.

 

Social Media – If you log into our Services via a social media service or if you connect a social media account with our Services, we share information about you or your activities on that social media service, including what you view on our websites and applications, with that social media service and/or its users. Social media services will use that information based on their own privacy policies. If you do not want your information shared in this way, do not connect your social media service account with our Services, or log out of your social media service before using our Services.

 

For Legal Compliance or Public Interest – We may share your personal information when we believe it is necessary to comply with the law or legal process; to protect and defend our rights or to prevent misuse of our Services; or to protect the personal safety of our employees, agents, partners, the users of the Services, or the public.

 

Corporate Transactions – In the event that we sell or transfer our business, merge with another entity, or engage in another sort of corporate transaction, we may share your personal information with the acquiring entity.

 

At Your Direction – We may also share your personal information with third parties when you instruct us to do so.

 

  1. How Long Your Information Is Stored

There is no singular retention period for personal information we hold about you. In general, we store your information for as long as needed to fulfill the purpose(s) for which we collected it. We typically keep personal information considered sensitive under applicable laws for no more than a year from the date it was collected, but may keep it (and other information) for longer when it is necessary to fulfill a legal obligation.

 

  1. Tracking Technologies and Privacy Choices

Unless you’ve opted-out, when you visit our website or use our lication (our “Services”), we and our third-party partners use online tracking technology such as cookies, pixels, SDKs, and other similar technologies to analyze your use of our Services and your engagement with advertisements, and to serve you interest-based advertisements. The following explains tracking technologies in greater detail and provides you with information on how to opt out of them.

 

Types of Online Tracking Technologies

Cookies – Cookies are small text files stored in your device’s browser when you visit a website. They make it possible to recognize you as the same user across one or more browsing sessions, and across one or more websites. We and our partners use cookies for a variety of purposes, including remembering your sign-in credentials and preferences so that you do not have to input them each time you use the Services; allowing us and third parties to customize your experience using the Services, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you on our websites and elsewhere online; and allowing us and third parties to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our Services and your experience.

 

Pixels – Pixels (also called “web tags” or “web beacons”) are tiny graphics or scripts that communicate information from your device to a server. Pixels can be embedded in online or mobile content, videos, advertisements, or emails. They allow a server to read certain types of information from your device, such as when you viewed content that contains the pixel and the IP address of the device on which you viewed it. We and third parties use pixels for a variety of purposes, including to analyze the use of our Services and to provide content and ads that are more relevant to you.

 

How to Opt Out

There are a number of ways to opt out of having your online activity and device data collected by third parties, which we have summarized below. Please note that using these tools to opt out of tracking and targeting does not mean that you will receive no advertising while using our Services. Instead, you will cease receiving advertisements tailored to your interests.

 

Changing your browser settings – Most web browsers automatically accept cookies by default, but typically allow you to change your settings to disable or reject them. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Note, however, that if you reject or disable cookies, some features of our Services may not work or may not work as designed.

 

Using Privacy Plug-ins or Browsers – You can block our websites from setting cookies used for interest-based ads by using a browser with default privacy features, like Brave, or installing browser plugins like Privacy Badger, Ghostery or uBlock Origin, and configuring them to block third party cookies/trackers.

 

  1. Statement on No Children’s Data

The Services are not intended for children under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13 (under 16 for those located in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland) and we do not target the Services to such children. If you are under 13 years of age, or if you are under 16 years of age and are located in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, do not provide personal information to DWC without providing us with consent from your parents. If we discover that any child under the age of 13 or a child from the EEA, UK, or Switzerland under the age of 16 has provided us with personal information and we do not have parental consent, we will delete that child’s information as soon as reasonably practicable. If you believe that we have been provided with the personal information of a child from the EEA, UK, or Switzerland under the age of 16 without parental consent, or have been provided with the personal information of any child under the age of 13 without parental consent, please notify us immediately at info@dwcug.org.

 

  1. Contests, Sweepstakes or Games

When we run a contest, sweepstakes, or game relating to the Services, it will be accompanied by a set of rules. The rules for each contest, sweepstakes or game will specify how the information gathered from you for entry will be used and disclosed if it is different than as described in this Privacy Policy. In conjunction with your entry in such contests or sweepstakes, personal information will be collected only if you voluntarily submit it.

 

  1. Contact Us

If you have questions about our Privacy Policy, please contact us at:

 

ATTN: General Counsel

Development Watch Center

Plot 212, RTG Plaza, 3rd Floor, Office C7

Hoima Road, Rubaga

Phone: +256 393 247885

Email: info@dwcug.org

 

If you have questions about subscriptions, please contact us at:

 

DWC Customer Care

Phone: +256 393 247885

Email: info@dwcug.org

 

  1. Additional Information for Users in Europe and the United Kingdom

The following information is provided for and applies to those located in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and other similar laws.

 

Legal Bases for Processing

We process your personal data consistent with the ways described previously in this policy. When we do, we rely on one or more “legal bases” to do so. The legal bases we rely on are:

  • With your consent, such as when you accept cookies;
  • To perform our agreement to provide you with Services, such as to maintain your account or to fulfill your subscription; or
  • For our “legitimate interests,” such as maintaining the security of Services, preventing fraud, or marketing. We only engage in legitimate interest-based processing where it has little to no impact on your data privacy-related fundamental rights and freedoms.

 

International Data Transfers

We may store your personal information on servers located outside of Europe or the United Kingdom. When you access our Services from Europe or the United Kingdom, your personal data may be subject to an “international data transfer” as defined in the European Data Privacy Laws. In order to protect the security of your information when making such transfers, we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and/or the United Kingdom’s International Data Transfer Agreement/Addendum depending on the source of the data and the specific circumstances of the transfer.

 

Your Rights and How to Exercise Them

You have certain rights related to our processing and retention of your personal information, which are described below. To exercise these rights, please contact us at info@dwcug.org and include as complete a description of the request as possible.

 

Access – This Privacy Policy describes the personal information we collect and how we use and disclose it. If you would also like to know the specific pieces of personal information we hold about you, we will provide you with a copy upon your request.

 

Correction – If you believe that any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate you may request that we correct it. You can update some information, like your contact details, yourself by visiting your account page. For other corrections, please contact us as described above.

 

Deletion – You may request that we delete the personal information we hold about you. Please note that we may need to retain limited amounts of personal information after completing your request for legal compliance purposes.

 

Objection/Restriction/Withdrawal of Consent – You may object to, restrict, and/or withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information if you believe our processing (i) uses inaccurate information; (ii) is unlawful; or (iii) when our processing is based on your consent or our legitimate interests. You may also opt out of receiving marketing communications from us by emailing us at info@dwcug.org.

 

  1. Additional Information for Users in Certain Jurisdictions

Depending on where you reside, you may be afforded additional rights in accordance with your local data privacy laws. This includes rights of access, correction, deletion, objection, and restriction. To exercise any such rights, please contact us at info@dwcug.org and include as complete a description of your request as possible. Upon receiving certain types of requests, we may ask you to verify your identity before we can move forward. If your request is denied, you may appeal that decision by emailing us at info@dwcug.org.