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Privacy Policy

Effective date: April 18, 2026

1. Overview and scope

Expert Connect is a direct marketplace for paid video consultations between clients and domain experts. This Privacy Policy explains how Expert Connect collects, uses, shares, stores, and protects personal information when you use our website, create an account, browse profiles, create projects, book consultations, join video calls, receive payouts, or contact support.

This Privacy Policy applies to people who use Expert Connect as clients, experts, or visitors. It also applies to information we collect through our website, account systems, booking workflows, payment flows, support interactions, and related services.

2. Who we are

Expert Connect provides the platform infrastructure for discovery, scheduling, payment, and quality enforcement for expert consultations. If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or want to exercise your privacy rights, you can contact us at support@expert-connect.co.

3. Information we collect from experts

When you create or use an expert account, we may collect the following categories of personal information:

  • Identity: name, email address, avatar photo.
  • Professional: job title, company, seniority level, industry, LinkedIn URL, Twitter URL, personal website URL.
  • Work history: past employers, job titles, employment dates, role descriptions, company domains.
  • Expertise: function tags, domain tags, region tags, industry tags.
  • Contact: phone number, country code, SMS opt-in preference.
  • Financial: Stripe Connect account ID and payout status. We do not store bank account numbers or routing numbers — these are held by Stripe.
  • Availability: weekly office hours, timezone, booking lead time preferences.
  • Content: bio text, thought leadership documents (PDFs), article links.
  • Preferences: profile privacy settings, name visibility settings, notification preferences.

4. Information we collect from clients

When you create or use a client account, we may collect the following categories of personal information:

  • Identity: name, email address, avatar photo.
  • Professional: job title, company, industry.
  • Contact: phone number, country code, SMS opt-in preference.
  • Financial: Stripe customer ID and saved payment method tokens. We do not store full credit card numbers — these are handled by Stripe.
  • Content: project descriptions, screening questions, booking notes.
  • Preferences: name and company visibility settings, notification preferences, advance notice preferences.

5. Information generated through use of the platform

We also create and store information as part of operating the marketplace. This includes:

  • Interview records: used for scheduling, payment processing, status tracking, and audit trail purposes.
  • Proposed times: used to support scheduling negotiation between clients and experts.
  • Ratings and reviews: used to generate quality signals and improve marketplace trust.
  • Reports: used for trust and safety review, enforcement, and account moderation.
  • Expert strikes: used for quality enforcement and suspension decisions.
  • Search embeddings: numerical vector representations derived from expert profile text, used for expert discovery and search relevance.
  • Company cache: company metadata enrichment information from People Data Labs, maintained with a 90-day freshness window.

We also collect standard HTTP request logs through our hosting provider (Vercel), including IP address, request URL, timestamp, and browser user agent. Authentication session tokens are managed by Clerk.

6. AI-derived data and automated processing

Expert Connect uses certain AI and machine-learning tools to support profile setup, search, and project creation.

  • LinkedIn and resume parsing: uploaded PDF documents may be processed by Anthropic Claude to extract structured profile data such as work history, biography details, and tags. Extracted data is presented to you for review and editing before it is saved to your profile.
  • Project brief generation: text prompts submitted by clients may be processed by Anthropic Claude to generate a project title and description. Generated content is presented for review and editing before it is published.
  • Expert profile embeddings: concatenated profile text may be processed by VoyageAI to create a numerical vector used for search and ranking. These embeddings are mathematical representations, not readable text, and are used solely for search relevance.
  • Auto-tagging: profile text may be processed using VoyageAI and cosine similarity to suggest taxonomy tags.

We use these tools to operate platform features. AI processing is not used on consultation content. We do not use AI to monitor, analyze, summarize, or transcribe your video consultations. Consultation content is not used to train AI models.

7. How we use information

We use personal information to operate, secure, and improve Expert Connect. Depending on how you use the platform, we may use information to:

  • Create and manage user accounts and authenticate sessions.
  • Enable profile creation, expert discovery, and search relevance.
  • Facilitate booking requests, scheduling, screening questions, and consultation workflows.
  • Process payments, holds, captures, refunds, transfers, and expert payouts.
  • Send transactional emails and service notifications.
  • Support calendar integrations where enabled.
  • Enforce marketplace rules, trust and safety standards, and quality controls.
  • Investigate reports, disputes, no-shows, circumvention, and potential MNPI issues.
  • Maintain records for audit, tax, legal, security, and operational purposes.
  • Generate and maintain expert search embeddings, tags, and company enrichment data.
  • Respond to support requests and privacy rights requests.
  • Comply with legal obligations and cooperate with lawful requests.

8. How we share information

We share information only as needed to operate the platform, process payments, support video consultations, provide infrastructure, and comply with law. We do not sell personal information.

  • Clerk (authentication and user management) — receives email, name, OAuth tokens, and session cookies.
  • Supabase (database and file storage) — receives profile and transactional data stored through the platform.
  • Stripe (payment processing and payouts) — receives payment method tokens, transaction metadata, and Stripe Connect information. Full card numbers do not touch our servers.
  • Daily.co (video consultations) — receives room names and participant join and leave events. No recordings are stored through this service.
  • Resend (transactional email) — receives email addresses, names, and interview details such as time and duration.
  • VoyageAI (search embeddings and auto-tagging) — receives concatenated profile text including name, title, company, bio, work history, and tags.
  • People Data Labs (company enrichment) — receives company domain names only. No personal data is shared.
  • Anthropic (AI-powered PDF parsing and project generation) — receives PDF documents submitted for parsing and text prompts submitted for generation.
  • Recal.dev (calendar integration) — receives OAuth tokens for connected Google or Microsoft calendars.
  • Vercel (hosting and serverless infrastructure) — receives HTTP requests and server logs.

We may also share information if required by law, subpoena, court order, or regulatory request, or where necessary to protect rights, safety, platform integrity, or to investigate fraud, abuse, or prohibited conduct.

9. Cookies and similar technologies

Expert Connect uses essential cookies only. We do not use advertising cookies, analytics cookies, or third-party tracking pixels. We do not use Google Analytics, Segment, Mixpanel, or any third-party analytics services.

  • __session: Clerk session token. Essential, HttpOnly, Secure.
  • __clerk_db_jwt: Clerk JSON Web Token. Essential, HttpOnly, Secure.

We also use browser sessionStorage for temporary onboarding form state. This information is stored only in your browser, is never sent to our servers, and is cleared when the browser session ends. It is not used for advertising or cross-site tracking.

10. Consultation content and data isolation

Expert Connect is designed so that consultation content stays between the client and the expert involved in the booking. We do not share consultation content with other clients. We do not aggregate consultation content into research products. We do not resell consultation content. We do not use consultation content to train AI models.

At present, platform consultations are not recorded or transcribed, and there is no cloud storage of call content through the standard consultation flow. If recording or transcription features are introduced in the future, users will be notified before recording begins for each consultation.

11. Data retention

We retain information for as long as needed to operate the platform, maintain transaction records, enforce safety rules, and comply with legal obligations. Our current retention practices are as follows:

  • Active user profiles: retained while the account is active.
  • Deleted accounts: profile is immediately deactivated and personal data is targeted for purge within 30 days, except where retention is required for legal, financial, or safety purposes.
  • Interview records: retained indefinitely, including name snapshots used to preserve historical transaction records.
  • Ratings and reports: retained indefinitely.
  • Expert strikes: retained indefinitely.
  • Company cache: maintained with a 90-day freshness window and refreshed when stale data is accessed.
  • Thought leadership PDFs: retained in storage until the user deletes them or the account is removed.
  • Search embeddings: updated when an expert profile changes and deleted when the expert is removed.

Some records may be retained longer where necessary for tax, payment, dispute, fraud prevention, or legal compliance purposes.

12. Your rights and choices

Depending on your location, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of your personal information.

  • Access: you can view profile data from your dashboard.
  • Correction: you can edit profile information from your dashboard.
  • Deletion: you can request account deletion through settings or by contacting support. Account deletion results in immediate deactivation and a purge process within 30 days, subject to limited retention exceptions described in Section 11.
  • Data portability: you may request a copy of your personal data in a structured, machine-readable format by contacting support@expert-connect.co.
  • Communications choices: you can manage notification preferences in settings, including available notification channels and SMS opt-in choices.

To exercise privacy rights, contact support@expert-connect.co. We will respond to your request within 30 days.

13. GDPR notice for EEA, UK, and Swiss users

If you are located in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, or Switzerland, you may have additional rights under applicable data protection law, including the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict processing, object to certain processing, and request data portability.

Our legal bases for processing personal information include contract performance, such as creating accounts, enabling bookings, processing payments, and facilitating consultations, and legitimate interests, such as operating the marketplace, preventing fraud, maintaining platform security, enforcing rules, and improving search and marketplace quality.

You may contact us at support@expert-connect.co to exercise these rights. If you believe we have not adequately addressed your concerns, you have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority.

14. California privacy notice

If you are a California resident, you may have rights under California law regarding access to and deletion of personal information. Expert Connect does not sell personal information.

15. Security measures

We use a combination of technical and organizational measures to protect personal information. These measures include HTTPS across the platform, authentication through Clerk with industry-standard OAuth and session management, database controls through Supabase with Row-Level Security on most tables so users can only access their own data, webhook signature verification (HMAC-SHA256 and Svix) for providers such as Daily.co, Stripe, and Clerk, admin endpoint restrictions, and Stripe tokenization so full card numbers do not touch our servers.

No system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

16. Children's privacy

Expert Connect is intended only for users who are at least 18 years old. We do not knowingly collect personal information from individuals under 18. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a person under 18, we will take steps to delete that information promptly. If you believe a minor has provided us with personal information, please contact support@expert-connect.co.

17. Changes to this privacy policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes, we will notify you by email or through a notice on the platform and update the effective date at the top of this page. Your continued use of Expert Connect after the updated Privacy Policy takes effect means you accept the revised policy.

18. Contact

If you have questions, requests, or concerns about this Privacy Policy, contact us at:

Expert Connect
Email: support@expert-connect.co