To avoid spam users, buddies are not allowed to use anonymous identities or nicknames for the programme. They are required to provide their full names, gender, age, university, fields of study, nationality, first language, country of residence and contact information during application. Also, we choose to use WhatsApp as a platform for pairing buddies because each account is tied to its phone identity, unlike Skype, email, Facebook or other social media where fake users can manipulate multiple accounts. The identities of applicants are further verified as they upload their proofs of donation to their chosen COVID-19 charities or the confirmation email from charities indicating their participation in online volunteering initiatives during COVID-19 lockdown.

For the online meetings, we help to facilitate the initial call through setting up a common group for the buddies, with us being the third-party mediator, where they can discuss when they would like to have a call and how often they want to call. We do not listen to the calls because we value privacy, but we have mechanisms for buddies to directly “report” inappropriate content or users to our support staff so that we can warn, blacklist and exclude certain users from our community. To ensure their safety, we encourage buddies not to disclose their personal information before the online face-to-face call. After each call, the buddies are required to submit a screenshot of their meeting for our reference.

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We are mindful of having strong data privacy protections. We only share the data collected from our buddies with the buddies they pair with, with expressed permissions from the participants. Please check out our privacy policy for more information.