Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy - Expat Universe

Effective December 31, 2006

Protecting your privacy is very important to our website. We will not sell, lease or exchange your personal data to third parties without first obtaining your express consent.

This privacy policy describes how we collect and use your data. If you have any questions or comments regarding our privacy policy or its enforcement, please feel free to contact the administrator.

Expat Universe is an online social networking community that connects people through their personal profiles, forum postings and other means to exchange information related to living in a foreign country, to buy and sell goods and services and perform other transactions. Members create their own profiles, and those profiles are then shown to other members and visitors of this site.

Your Screen Name and Country are displayed to the public.
Your First Name, Screen Name and Country are displayed to other members.

Expat Universe allows our members to create friend lists. The personal information displayed to friends is different from that displayed to regular members and the public. When you accept a friendship request, each party to the friendship will be have access to First and Last name, as well as City and Country names as stored in their Profiles.

Your First Name, Last Name, City, Screen Name and Country are displayed to members on your friends list.

Expat Universe allows our members to exchange Private Messages with other members who are on the user's Friends list. The content in Private Messages is NOT encrypted and can be viewed by our staff as required in the normal course of their job. Our staff may also access these Private Messages in cases where a member has reported any type of abuse as defined in our Terms of Use.

Expat Universe collects information our users submit to us such as their name and e-mail address to allow us to identify users and notify them of changes or updates to our service. We also collect personal information submitted by our users in filling out their profile on the service such as gender, location, age, etc. We collect this personal information when our users: sign up as a member; make changes to their member profile information; and send e-mail messages. Members may choose to provide additional information beyond their basic profile for their other profile sections. Providing additional information beyond what is required at registration is entirely optional, but enables our users to better identify each other and more effectively connect and interact with their network.

Like many other Web sites, Expat Universe uses a standard technology called "cookies." Cookies are small pieces of information stored on your hard drive - not on our site. They can help make the Internet experience quicker and more convenient. Cookies allow our users to login without entering their email address and password each time they use Expat Universe. Members who disable cookies will not be able to use Expat Universe.

Your city, country and full name are displayed when a user invites a friend via email to join the service, when a user requests to add another user to their Expat Universe Friends list, and when we send notifications to a user related to their use of the service. Except when members invite friends, full names are not shared or displayed with people outside of their Personal Network. Email addresses of Expat Universe members are never displayed to other users on the system. Users within a Personal Network communicate on Expat Universe with each other through the Expat Universe service without disclosing their email addresses.

We will not sell, lease or exchange your personal data to third parties without first obtaining your express consent, unless required by law or to protect your membership.

If you use our Invite feature to invite a friend to our service, we will ask you for your friend's email address. We'll automatically send the friend an email inviting them to join your Personal Network, as well as two reminder messages. Expat Universe does not sell these email addresses or use them to transmit any communication other than the invitation and reminders to join your personal Network. Expat Universe stores this information for the sole purpose of sending this invitation and reminders, and for tracking the success of our Invite functionality.

The Expat Universe site may contain links to other Web sites. Please be aware that Expat Universe is not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites our users choose to visit. If our users provide any information directly to parties other than Expat Universe, different rules may apply to the use or disclosure of the personal information disclosed. We encourage you to investigate and ask questions before disclosing your personal information to third parties.

Please be aware that whenever members voluntarily disclose personal information online - e.g., message boards, file uploads, events, and classifieds - that information becomes public and can be collected and used by others. By posting personal information online in public forums, members may receive unsolicited messages from other parties.