Confidentiality & Conduct
What’s said here stays here.
These conversations can touch on politics, belief, and personal history — things people don’t say out loud unless they trust the room. This page is the room’s contract: every commitment below describes how BetweenUS Forum actually works, not an aspiration.
The commitments
- What’s said in a conversation stays between the two of you. That commitment doesn't expire when the call ends.
- Calls are never recorded or transcribed.
- Your political viewpoint is never shown to your match or your community’s organizers.
- You may decline a match or request a new one. Your match is never told why.
- Either participant may respectfully end a conversation.
- Conversations may not be used for fundraising, campaigning, solicitation, or recruitment.
- Your feedback is private and used to improve the program.
- There is a way to report a concern — see below.
The ground rules
Every member agrees to three rules at signup, and is reminded of them in the call itself:
Listen to understand
Curiosity over rebuttal. The goal is to learn how someone got to their view, not to win.
Assume good faith
Treat your partner as a thoughtful person who cares, even where you disagree.
Keep it confidential
What's said in the conversation stays between you two.
No recording. Presence only.
The video call is a private room for two. Nothing about its content is captured: no audio, no video, no transcript, no notes. The system records only that a conversation happened — who joined and for how long — so we know it took place without anyone having to report back.
Your political viewpoint is private
If you share where you sit politically, that answer is used for one thing: creating a balanced match. It is never shown to your match, your community’s organizers, or your sponsor organization — only the platform operator’s matching screen can see it, solely to construct balanced rounds. The Privacy Policy covers this in full.
You choose your conversations
A match is an invitation, not an obligation. If a pairing isn’t right — for any reason, or no stated reason — decline it from your conversation page and you’ll go back into the pool for the next round. Your match is told the conversation is off, never why. And once a conversation is underway, either participant may respectfully end it at any point.
Not a venue for anything else
These conversations exist for understanding across difference. They may not be used for fundraising, campaigning, solicitation, recruitment, or selling — political or otherwise. If a conversation turns into a pitch, that’s a conduct issue worth reporting.
Your feedback is private
After a conversation, we ask each participant a few short questions about how it went. Your answers are never shown to your match. Community organizers see aggregate results only — overall numbers, with small groups suppressed so no individual response is inferable — and use them to improve the program.
Reporting a concern
If something in a conversation felt inappropriate, unsafe, or against these rules, tell us: email privacy@betweenusforum.org and the operator will follow up personally, or use the private notes field in the post-conversation feedback — those notes go to the program team only, never to your match. Reporting a concern never affects your standing in the community.
Where these rules come from
The commitments on this page bind the platform — they are baked into how it is built. Your community (YPO Democracy Group) may also carry its own confidentiality norms, like forum confidentiality; nothing here weakens those. When in doubt, the stricter norm wins.