Privacy policy
The University of Waterloo's Alumni Relations respects your privacy and keeps all personal information strictly confidential. The Alumni E-Community adheres to the Alumni Relations privacy policy and all policies and procedures of the University of Waterloo in regards to the handling and storage of personally identifiable information.
Alumni Directory
Your alumni directory listing by default will only reveal public information about you: your first name, your last name, any preferred or maiden names, and the degrees that you have received from the University of Waterloo.
Additionally, you may choose to add a contact email address and links to your social media profiles to your alumni directory profile. You must explicitly enable the display of your email address or social media links before they will appear on your profile.
Your home address and business address are retrieved on-demand from the Office of Advancement database. This information is not stored on the Alumni E-Community, unless you have consented to show your current job title and employer. If you have consented to reveal that information to other alumni, only your job title and employer are stored in the Alumni E-Community.
The university grants access to the Office of Advancement database only to individuals who need it to carry out their duties and have signed a Confidentiality Agreement. Your home address and business address are not shared with any other members of the Alumni E-Community under any circumstances.
Alumni News
Alumni news (formerly "Class notes") that you submit will be stored in the Office of Advancement database and submitted to the Alumni Officers for your faculty and/or college. Your submitted news items will be visible to all members of the Alumni E-Community.
An Alumni Officer may reach out to your for your consent to use, reference, or excerpt your news in an Alumni Publication (such as the Alumni Newsletter).
Alumni Email Forwarding Service
For diagnostic and troubleshooting purposes, we log basic details about email traffic through our mail servers for a period of approximately thirty days. These log files contain only the sender's email address, and recipient's email address, the date and time the message was sent, and diagnostic codes detailing the status of the email delivery through the mail server system.
No copies of any email sent to an alumni forwarding address are kept or stored on our servers, with the exception of delayed email messages. In the case of delayed email messages, the server will store the messages temporarily in order to make additional attempts to deliver the message to offline or unresponsive mail servers.
"Contact this Alumnus"
The "Contact this alumnus" functionality allows alumni to send messages to other alumni who may or may not have made contact information available to the public.
If the alumnus has consented to receive messages from the E-Community, the messages will be sent directly to the preferred contact email address that we have on file for them. If the alumnus has not consented to receive messages from the E-Community, the submitted messages will be sent to Alumni Relations, who will look up the contact information (and any contact restrictions) on file and try to pass the message along if they are able.
Messages sent through this utility are logged on the servers for diagnostic purposes. This tracking includes the name of the sender, name of the recipient, date and time the message was sent, and the full content of the message. These logfiles are only accessible to E-Community site administrators, and are only reviewed to diagnose technical problems or to pursue reported abuse of the "Contact this alumnus" feature. Any messages that are routed to Alumni Relations may be retained in email on University systems.
Alumni Relations will never release any alumni contact information directly. Only information that you make explicitly public on your profile will be shared with other alumni. Enabling the "Contact this alumnus" feature will not make your email address or any other contact information public--the address that messages are sent to is kept private.
Website privacy
Office of Advancement websites make use of website tracking and analytics software. The information gathered through this resource enables us to analyze trends in our online traffic so we can continuously improve our online presence. Please see the University of Waterloo website privacy statement for more details.
Updating communication preferences
If you need to update your communication preferences please use the link below:
Alumni communication preferences form
Questions or concerns?
If you have any concerns about how your personal information is treated, please contact Sean Thomas, AVP, Advancement Services by email or by calling 519-888-4567, ext. 41847.
We also adhere to the University of Waterloo's Protection of Privacy and Freedom of Information Guidelines.
