Everything on AlmaBond is private to the university. Your information is never sold, never shared with anyone outside the university, and never used for advertising, tracking, or any purpose other than running this platform.
What AlmaBond collects
Account details: your name, your username (a short handle taken from the part of your email before the @, which cannot be changed), your email address (a university address, or the one an alum joined with), your role (student, alumni, or staff), and class year.
Optional profile details: a photo, pronouns, a birthday (month and day only), a short headline, a major (students), and links to your LinkedIn, GitHub, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or your own website. You choose whether to add these, and you can change or remove them any time from your profile page.
What you do on the platform: the clubs you join or lead, events you register for or check in to, the posts, comments, and likes you make, and which notifications you have marked as read, who you mention in posts and comments, and when you were last active on the site (shown to other members as a green or yellow dot, which you can turn off in your profile).
Phone number (optional): students, staff and alumni can add one to their profile, and alumni give one when they ask to join. It is never shown on your profile or in the directory. Only you and the alumni engagement office can see it.
Forms: when a university office runs a form on AlmaBond (a survey, a sign-up, or a vote), your answers are stored with your account. The office that made the form can read the answers; if it hides respondents, results show no names (you still can't answer twice). Other students can't see your answers.
Forms shared by link: an office can share a form with “anyone with the link”. If it doesn't ask for a sign-in, anyone with the link can answer without an account, and the answers are saved with no name, email or account attached, so the office sees only what the person typed. To stop spam, that form shows a bot check from Cloudflare (Turnstile), and we count how often one internet address submits so floods can be turned away. That count is kept scrambled, only for a short time, and is never saved with the answers.
Sign-in: how you sign in (a password, a passkey, Google, LinkedIn, or two-factor codes) is handled by our sign-in provider. We don't see your passwords, and we only get the name and email each service shares.
Elections: whether you've voted (so nobody can vote twice) and, if you run, your candidate statement.
Requests: event and budget requests that club leaders submit for their clubs.
AlmaBond has no advertising trackers and no third-party tracking scripts. (The only outside scripts are the Cloudflare bot check described above, on the sign-in, join and link-form pages, and YouTube's player, which loads only when you press play on a YouTube video someone shared.)
How it's used
Only to make the platform work: showing your profile to others at the university, letting clubs manage their members and events, running elections, and letting university offices review requests. That's it.
Who can see what
Signed-in members of your university can see your name, your username and the profile details you've chosen to add. Nothing on AlmaBond is visible to people who aren't signed in.
Club leaders and university offices can see the names and emails of people who join their club, request to join, or register for their events, and the requests submitted for approval. University offices such as Student Life and SGA review event and budget requests.
Elections: results are shown as totals. The app doesn't show anyone who voted for whom.
Admin activity: what administrators do with their admin powers (reviewing requests, running elections, forms and broadcasts, adding admins, downloading or copying alumni lists) is recorded in an activity log, so there is a record of who did what. The platform maintainer can read it, and an office's owners can see what the other admins of their own office did with admin permissions in the last 90 days. It does not include your chats or what you read.
Demo accounts: a few accounts are made so that people (for example a prospective partner) can try AlmaBond. For those accounts only, each sign-in records the time, the IP address, an approximate place worked out from that IP address (no location is requested from your device), and the type of browser, so the account can be kept safe. Nothing is recorded this way for ordinary accounts.
Numbers, not people: the analytics pages for the alumni engagement office and Student Life show counts and trends (for example, how many alumni joined this month), never a list of individual people's activity.
The platform maintainer (that's me, Suraj) can technically access the database in order to run, fix, and improve AlmaBond. I don't look at individual people's information for any other reason.
Alumni
Joining: alumni ask to join with their name, graduation month and year, campus, major, and an email address. The alumni engagement office reviews each request. We keep the request, the decision, and who made it.
Added by the office: the alumni engagement office can add alumni it has already verified, one at a time or from a spreadsheet, with their name, email, graduation month and year, campus and major (and optionally a phone number, job title and employer). Each person is emailed an invitation to set up sign-in.
The alumni list (alumni engagement office only): the office can see every alum in its community in one list, including the email address and phone number each alum gave, and can filter and sort it. To stay in touch, it can copy emails or phone numbers, download the list as a spreadsheet, send a notification, or invite people to a group chat (alumni who hide themselves from the directory can't be invited). Downloads and copying across pages are recorded in the activity log. These details are never shown to other members.
The alumni directory. Approved alumni are listed by default, and can turn the listing off at any time in their profile. When listed, signed-in AlmaBond members can see their name, photo, graduation year, major, campus, and any employer, title, industry, city, or social links they choose to add. Email addresses are never shown in the directory.
The network feed: short updates that students and alumni choose to post (up to 5,000 characters, with a photo or a file such as a PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, CSV, ZIP or other common file of up to 25 MB) are visible to signed-in AlmaBond members. Club posts are visible to the people who can see that club's page, and a file on a club post follows the same rule. Attached files are kept privately and handed out only to signed-in members who are allowed to see the post, never at a public address; photos are re-saved smaller, which also removes the location and camera details they carried. You can delete your own posts at any time (their files are removed with them), and anyone can report a post to the alumni engagement office, which can hide it. A file you attach to a post or message is uploaded as soon as you choose it; if you never post or send it, it is deleted automatically within a day or two.
Graduating: if you tell us a personal email before you graduate, the alumni engagement office sees it, along with your school email and graduation date, to verify you (and may use them to contact you about it). After you graduate, your account becomes an alumni account that signs in with that email, and your club memberships stay (without any leadership positions).
Messages: members of the same community can send each other a message request (one short note) if their community allows it. The person asked sees it, and if they accept, the two of them can chat inside AlmaBond and share links, photos and files of up to 25 MB; email addresses aren't shared. Only the two people in a conversation can read it. If someone reports a message, the alumni engagement office can read that message and the report. You can edit or delete your own messages (deleted ones disappear for both people straight away and are removed for good after 30 days). In a one-to-one chat either person can block the other: the conversation ends (it stays readable, but nobody can send), the person who blocked is remembered so that only they can unblock it, and the other person can't send them a new request while the block lasts. Unblocking opens the same conversation again. Group chats work the same way: you are added only when you accept an invitation, and from then on you can read the group's messages, including those written before you joined. Live updates use a signed channel that carries no message content. In any chat you can reply to a specific message (the reply shows a short preview of the original) and react to messages with an emoji; both are visible only to the people in that chat. Seen marks: when you have read a message, the person who wrote it (or, in a group, the group) can see that you have, and when. You can turn this off with “Show when I've read messages” in your profile; you then no longer show as having read anything, and you don't see anyone else's seen marks either. This does not change your unread counts.
Where it's stored
AlmaBond runs on standard cloud services: the site is hosted on Vercel, and the database and uploaded images and files are stored with Supabase. Email (for example, alumni approvals and password resets) is sent through Resend, and Cloudflare provides the domain and the human-check on the sign-in page, the alumni join form and forms shared by link. Sentry receives error reports, which contain technical details about a problem (the page, the error message and the type of browser), never names, emails or profile information. These services handle your information on AlmaBond's behalf, only so the platform can run. They don't get to use it for anything else.
Cookies
AlmaBond uses only the cookies it needs to keep you signed in, and they're removed when you log out. There are no advertising cookies. You stay signed in until you sign out or change your password (changing it signs you out everywhere else).
If you choose “This is my device” when entering a two-factor code, we also set a cookie for 30 days so that browser isn't asked for a code again. We keep only a scrambled version of its secret, which you can clear any time on the Security page.
AlmaBond also measures how fast its pages load (an anonymous timing sent when a page finishes loading, with no cookie and nothing that identifies you) so slow pages can be found and fixed.
Your browser also keeps two small preferences on your own device: whether you chose dark mode, and whether you have visited the Community page (for the getting-started checklist). These never leave your device.
The phone app and notifications
The AlmaBond app for iPhone and Android is the same service as the website, inside an app. If you turn on notifications, your phone gives AlmaBond a notification token (a code that identifies your phone to Apple or Google, not your name). We keep it with your account only to send you a notification when someone messages you, answers a request, or your event is decided. The notification shows a short preview of the message, so it can appear on your lock screen; you can turn notifications off in your phone's settings at any time. When you sign out of the app, or delete your account, the token is deleted.
If you choose to add a photo, the app asks your phone for permission to use the camera or your photos, and only uses the picture you pick. AlmaBond does not use your location, contacts or microphone, and does not track you across other apps or websites.
Calendar subscriptions
If you choose “Subscribe to calendar” on the events page, AlmaBond creates a private link for you so your calendar app (Google, Apple, Outlook) can keep itself up to date. Anyone who has that link can see the events in it, so treat it like a password and don't share it. The link only ever includes events you're allowed to see, and you can reset it any time to make the old one stop working.
Links to other sites
Registration links: some events send you to another website to register. The button says “Register now” and opens that site in a new tab. Once you're there, that site's own policies apply, not this one.
Alumni events: some alumni events shown on AlmaBond are copied from the university's public events page. Only the public event details are copied, never anything about you.
SJNY Connect, in the menu under your initials (top right) once you're signed in, links to SJNY Connect, a separate platform run by the alumni department. Once you're there, that site's own policies apply, not this one.
Your choices
Update or remove your optional profile details any time from your profile page.
Download everything AlmaBond holds about you, or delete your account (which removes your personal details, posts and comments; what you wrote in chats stays in those chats, shown as “Deleted user”), from the same page. Staff and admin accounts can also turn on two-factor sign-in under Security.
When a club leader deletes an event, post or form, it disappears immediately and is kept out of sight for 30 days in case it was a mistake, then removed for good. Deleting your own account removes your personal details right away.
To ask a question, correct something, or have your information removed, email me and I'll take care of it:
Changes to this policy
If anything meaningful changes in how AlmaBond handles information, I'll update this page and the date at the top.
