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YOUR INFORMATION

Privacy Policy

Effective and last updated: August 30, 2026
This Privacy Policy explains how UYards handles information when you use our campus community app, website and related support services. UYards is operated from Hong Kong by Tianrun Hou, an individual trading as UYards, who is the data user responsible for the personal information described in this policy. Section 12 sets out additional information that applies to users in Hong Kong, including our Personal Information Collection Statement.

1. Information we collect

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Account information, such as your email address, authentication provider identifier, account status and the date you confirmed you meet our minimum age.
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Profile and education information, such as your display name, username, profile photo, bio, university, faculty, programme, student status and intake details.
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Verification information, such as a university email address or a document you choose to submit to confirm your student or alumni status.
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Content and activity, including posts, comments, communities, friendships, likes, saved items, messages, photos, voice messages, meet-up details, reports and moderation records.
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Location information only when you choose to use a location feature. This can include a location you deliberately send in a message, and foreground location used to calculate an approximate distance band to a friend.
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Your country or region of residence, and the location of your university, so that we can apply the correct regional terms and legal protections to your account.
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Your consent and preference records, including which version of each policy you accepted, when you accepted it, and your choices about optional features and optional messages.
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Transaction information, if you buy a paid feature. This is limited to your purchase and subscription status and the transaction identifier supplied by the app store. Payments are handled by the app store, so we never receive your card number, bank details or billing address.
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Technical and support information, such as timestamps, security and abuse-prevention logs, error diagnostics generated by the service, and information you include in a support request.

2. How we use information

We use the information described above for the following purposes.
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Provide and personalise accounts, profiles, communities, messaging, discovery, meet-ups and other features you request.
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Verify eligibility for campus communities and protect those communities from impersonation.
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Provide information and features relating to study, campus life, internships, employment and career development, including content published by verified organisations such as universities, student bodies and employers.
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Select, rank, match and present content, communities, people and opportunities that are likely to be relevant to you, using signals such as your university, faculty, programme, intake, interests and how you use UYards.
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Operate safety tools, investigate reports, enforce our rules, prevent fraud and secure the service.
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Respond to support, copyright, privacy and appeal requests, and keep records of those requests and their outcomes.
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Maintain, troubleshoot, analyse and improve the reliability, safety and quality of UYards.
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Provide, manage and support any paid features you buy, handle refund and billing enquiries, and detect abuse of trials, promotions and refunds.
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Comply with legal obligations and establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
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Send you optional messages about opportunities or features, but only where you have separately switched that on. See section 6.
We do not use third-party advertising networks, and we do not use third-party analytics or tracking software development kits in the UYards app.
We do not use your content or messages to train generative artificial intelligence models, and we do not provide your content to third parties for that purpose.

3. Location privacy

Nearby discovery is optional, is switched off until you turn it on, and runs only while the app is open. UYards does not collect location in the background. Nearby discovery requires mutual participation between accepted friends.
Other users never receive your coordinates. They are shown an approximate distance band rather than an exact figure, and the bands widen with distance, so that a distance shown in UYards cannot be used to work out where you are.
Turning nearby discovery off deletes the active coordinate record. Nearby calculations ignore stale pings. A location you deliberately send in a message remains part of that conversation until the message or the relevant account data is removed.

4. When information is shared

We may transfer personal information to the following classes of recipient.
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Other users of UYards, according to the feature you use and your privacy settings—for example, profile details, posts, comments and messages.
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Service providers that host, secure, authenticate, store or deliver UYards, including our cloud backend provider. They may process information only to provide services to us and on our instructions.
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Universities, student organisations and other institutions, where you ask us to verify your affiliation with them or where you choose to interact with them through UYards.
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Employers, recruiters and other organisations whose opportunities are made available through UYards, but only where you choose to apply to, contact or share your information with them. We do not sell or otherwise supply your personal information to employers or recruiters for them to market to you.
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The app store you bought through, and any payment or billing service provider we use, for the purpose of taking payment, managing subscriptions and handling refunds.
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Professional advisers, auditors and insurers, under a duty of confidentiality.
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Law enforcement, regulators or other parties where reasonably necessary to comply with law, protect users, investigate abuse, or defend the rights and safety of UYards and others.
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A successor entity as part of a business reorganisation or transfer, subject to appropriate confidentiality and notice where required.

5. Optional and required information

You must provide an email address, a password or a supported sign-in provider, a display name and a confirmation that you meet our minimum age. Without these we cannot create or operate your account.
Everything else is voluntary. If you do not provide university, faculty, programme, intake or verification information, you can still use UYards, but campus communities and verified features may be unavailable to you. If you do not turn on nearby discovery, that feature simply does not operate.

6. Optional messages about opportunities

UYards may in future let you receive messages about internships, jobs, events or features that may interest you. We will not send you these messages unless you have separately and expressly switched them on.
That choice is always presented on its own. It is never bundled with your acceptance of this policy, our Terms of Service or our Community Guidelines, it is switched off by default, and declining it never restricts your use of UYards.
Before we first send you any such message we will tell you the kinds of personal information we intend to use and the kinds of opportunity or subject we intend to send you. You can withdraw the choice at any time, free of charge, from your settings or by emailing support@uyards.com, and we will stop.

7. Retention and deletion

We keep information only for as long as needed for the purpose it was collected for, together with any period required for legal, safety, audit or dispute-resolution reasons.
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Verification documents are deleted within 30 days of the verification decision. We retain only the outcome, the method and the date.
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Active nearby-discovery coordinates are deleted as soon as you switch the feature off, and stale coordinates are disregarded and cleared.
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Reports, moderation actions, appeal records and security logs are retained for up to seven years after the relevant decision, so that we can enforce our rules consistently, handle appeals and defend legal claims.
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Consent and preference records are retained for as long as your account exists and for seven years afterwards, because they are the record of what you agreed to.
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Transaction records are retained for seven years, because tax and accounting law requires us to keep business records for that period. Deleting your account does not delete them.
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Other account-linked data is deleted or anonymised when you delete your account, as described below.

8. What happens when you delete your account

You can delete your account in UYards under Profile → Settings → Delete account. Deletion cannot be undone.
Deleting your account removes your verification files, deletes your account-linked data, and anonymises your profile so that it no longer identifies you. Posts and comments you created are deleted or permanently detached from your identity.
Two things do not disappear, and you should know this before you delete. Messages you already sent to another person remain in that person’s copy of the conversation, shown from an anonymised account, because they are also that person’s record of their own conversation. Reports, moderation actions and security logs are retained for the period described in section 7, because deleting them would defeat the purpose of keeping them.
If you hold a paid subscription, deleting your UYards account does not cancel it and does not by itself entitle you to a refund. Subscriptions are billed by the app store and can only be cancelled there, so cancel first, then delete. Transaction records are retained as described in section 7.
If you cannot access the app, email support@uyards.com from the address associated with the account.

9. Your choices and rights

You can edit your profile, make your account private, control optional nearby sharing, manage notification preferences, block users and delete your account from within UYards.
You may ask us whether we hold personal information about you, ask for a copy of it, and ask us to correct it if it is inaccurate. Email support@uyards.com. We may need to verify your identity before we respond, and we will respond within the period required by the law that applies to you. Depending on where you live you may have further rights, which are described in the regional section below.

10. Minimum age

UYards is only for people aged 18 or over. We ask you to confirm your age when you create an account, and we record that confirmation.
UYards is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18 we will close it and delete the associated data. If you believe someone under 18 has provided personal information to us, contact support@uyards.com so we can investigate.
We may ask you to verify your age, including by providing identification, where we have reason to doubt that you meet this requirement.

11. Security and international processing

We use technical and organisational safeguards designed to protect information, including access controls, encryption in transit, row-level access rules and private storage for verification documents and message media. No system is completely secure.
If a security incident affects your personal information and creates a real risk of significant harm, we will notify you and any regulator we are required to notify, as promptly as we reasonably can.
UYards is operated from Hong Kong and our cloud backend provider stores and processes information on servers that may be located outside your country or region. Wherever information is processed, we require the same standard of protection described in this policy through our contracts with those providers.

12. Hong Kong: Personal Information Collection Statement

This section applies to users in Hong Kong and is our Personal Information Collection Statement for the purposes of the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance (Cap. 486). The data user is Tianrun Hou, trading as UYards, contactable at support@uyards.com.
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Purpose. Your personal data is collected for the purposes set out in section 2 of this policy.
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Transferees. Your personal data may be transferred to the classes of recipient set out in section 4 of this policy.
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Obligatory and voluntary data. Section 5 explains which information you must supply and what happens if you do not.
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Direct marketing. We will not use your personal data in direct marketing, or provide it to any other person for use in direct marketing, unless you have separately given your consent as described in section 6. We do not and will not sell or transfer your personal data to any other person for that person’s direct marketing, whether for gain or otherwise.
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Access and correction. You have the right to request access to and correction of your personal data. Send requests to support@uyards.com. We may charge a reasonable fee for complying with a data access request, as permitted by the Ordinance.
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Complaints. If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your personal data, you may complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Hong Kong.
Where we expand UYards to other regions, we will publish additional regional sections describing the rights and protections that apply there.

13. Changes and contact

We may update this policy as UYards changes. We will post the revised version here and change the effective date. Where a change materially affects how we use your personal information, we will give you notice in the app before the change takes effect, and where the law requires your consent we will ask for it separately rather than relying on your continued use.
Questions or privacy requests: support@uyards.com.
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