Casey Fenton

(http://www.couchsurfing.org/news/article/145)

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Myths and Facts: CouchSurfing's conversion to a B Corp September 14, 2011

Since we converted to a B Corporation two weeks ago, CouchSurfers have been asking questions and sharing their opinions with us. (Thanks to everyone who’s written!) We thought it would be helpful to clear up some of the most common misconceptions we’ve been hearing.

Myth: The CouchSurfing team knows how it will make money, but it doesn’t want to share this with members.

Fact: We are investigating lots of options for generating revenue, but we haven’t yet chosen a plan.

We’re not ignoring the fact that, now that we can no longer accept donations, we will need to find an alternative way of earning money to keep CouchSurfing going. However, our initial investment makes it possible for us to take the time we need to find the best possible way to do this. Our first and foremost focus is perfecting what we already do. We are confident that we will find a way to generate money that doesn’t hinder the amazing experiences that CouchSurfers have. It's not at all uncommon in the US tech industry to receive an investment without yet having a firm decision made about how to generate revenue.

Myth: CouchSurfing has been sold to investors.

Fact: CouchSurfing has a partnership with the investors, but is still run by the same organization as before.

Our investors aren’t in our office calling the shots. Strategic decisions are still made by the CouchSurfing team. The investors have a minority stake that allows them to contribute their perspective, but ultimately the direction of CouchSurfing remains controlled by the same organization.

Myth: The CouchSurfing co-founders were given the money from the investors.

Fact: The investment belongs to CouchSurfing, not to individuals.

The purpose of the investment is to pay for CouchSurfing’s operating expenses and future innovations. Previously we earned this money through member donations, but as a B Corporation we can no longer accept these. Our expenses include the salaries of all of our employees, including the co-founders that work with us full-time. The rates that we pay at are based on market standards and we operate frugally for a company of our size.

Myth: CouchSurfing could have remained a non-profit, even if it didn’t gain 501c3 status.

Fact: CouchSurfing was only allowed to operate as a non-profit while it was in the application process for 501c3.

After our final rejection for 501c3 at the federal level, the government of the state that we were registered in would no longer allow us to operate as a non-profit. Our status up until our conversion was an unusually drawn out part of the normal process that US non-profits go through while registering at the federal level, not an accepted permanent state for an organization.

Myth: CouchSurfing could move to another country and be a non-profit there.

Fact: Moving to another country could take years of work and huge amounts of money, which would distract from our mission and vision.

Changing from a non-profit was a massively complex task that took just under a year in research and execution. Moving a company to a new country is even more complicated. How this would be accomplished varies from place to place, but it would have involved millions of dollars and potentially years of research, negotiations, and arrangements. In the time that we would have spent trying to find a country to move to, working with their government to make the plan, transferring our legal status, and obtaining visas for our staff, we would not have been able to focus on the rest of our work. We’ve already spent far too much time and money on our legal status — those resources are much better put towards supporting the CouchSurfing community.

Myth: CouchSurfing is going to sell member data or make it accessible to third parties.

Fact: We still follow the same privacy policies as before.

Our investors don’t have access to our database, and are not interested in buying it. They are interested in building amazing, sustainable organizations. Our privacy policy is the same as it’s always been.

(http://www.couchsurfing.org/news/article/149)

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A LETTER FROM DAN HOFFER February 20, 2012

Dear CouchSurfers,

This past year at CouchSurfing has been a unique one in our history. We've changed our legal structure. We shrank our team significantly (previously at 44 including part-time), and then grew it to around 35 people (roughly half in engineering). We opened our first real office, ever. We grew up a lot as an organization, adopting more internal structure and accountability than we've ever had. And we're going to continue hiring experienced people at all levels of the organization, from the top to the bottom. But throughout all the changes, it has always been important to me to preserve the original CouchSurfing spirit, values, vision, and mission. After all, that's why we all got involved in the first place.

As President of CouchSurfing International, the organization that supports the CS community, there are a number of areas I'd like to focus on improving. First, we need to make it easier for surfers and hosts to connect with one another. The ability to post travel plans, which gives hosts more ability to select when and who to host, was one of our first steps to address this issue. We've also just begun taking member suggestions on other ways to work on this problem.

Second, I think it is crucial that new members understand what CouchSurfing is really about. If we attract the wrong kinds of people, or the right kinds of people who have the wrong expectations, then we will lose some of our magic. So it's important to grow with the right people and in the right ways.

And finally, we have plans to improve the reference system, release a mobile app, improve the speed and reliability of the website, enhance our user interface and usability, and more. There is no shortage of things to do, and it takes time to build everything we want to build, even with our newly expanded team. But we're working hard and making progress every day!

I know that there has been a lot of change lately, and many of you are watching carefully to see where we're going. It's important to me that you know that our ideals as an organization have not changed. CouchSurfing has always been about something greater than just travel. It's about human connection. It's about experiences. It's about finding friends, experiencing community, and expanding your horizons wherever you go. It's about making the world a better place. I think we're closer than we've ever been to that goal.

Happy surfing and big hugs from California,

Dan Hoffer

(http://www.couchsurfing.org/news/article/203)

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TONY ESPINOZA, COUCHSURFINGS NEW CEO April 25, 2012

As you may have heard, this morning at 9am PST we announced that we have welcomed a new CEO to our team. This video is the extended cut from several interviews we did with Tony to give him the chance to speak directly to the community.

Tony comes to us with decades of experience building websites and software that work. He created the world's first personal digital assistant, and he also created the first versions of a web based calendar and large-scale multiplayer gaming networks.

Dan and Casey are both still here and managing the responsibilities that they have always had. The addition of Tony is a move towards bringing all of the efforts of the different teams together in new ways.

As many of you have experienced, recently the community has somewhat outgrown the existing website. It's been harder for surfers to find hosts, the quality of requests has been suffering, and overall it's been clear that we need to be doing something differently. Tony has a lot of ideas about how to solve these problems, and we're confident that his level of experience with building solutions that work is going to help him guide us towards some answers. I'm looking forward to sharing more information as we progress. At the moment, the work is just beginning.

Several people have reached out to me over the past two weeks to ask about changes within the CS organization. It's true that there has been a restructuring. Some people are no longer working with us. As their colleague, I'd like to thank them for everything they've contributed to CouchSurfing over the years, and everything that I learned from each of them.

Others of us have slightly different roles, including myself and some of the other people who you may have been in contact with as a Community Builder or Ambassador. This is the reason behind the recent dip in communication from us to you, and I'd like to say thank you for your patience on that front. We are currently hiring for a full-time person whose focus will be to support these programs and hopefully build them up into something even cooler than what they are now. In the meantime I'm still here and will be sharing information as it comes. There will be a lot of work going on and it'll be interesting stuff.

If you have a few moments, I highly recommend watching the video. Tony is a very articulate person and the interviews are a very good window into his thoughts about CouchSurfing.

(http://blog.couchsurfing.org/tony-espinoza-couchsurfings-new-ceo)

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• CS Organization
• General

Announcing our new CEO

Apr 25, 2012 by Casey Fenton - No Comments

Dear CouchSurfers,

It’s been a crazy eight years since CouchSurfing launched. The community has grown beyond our wildest dreams. Throughout all of it, our job — and the job of the CouchSurfing team as a whole — has been to build systems that help you connect with the people you want to meet, as easily, safely, and engagingly as possible.

We’re proud of everything that we’ve accomplished, but we know we could be doing an even better job. That’s why we recently hired a new CEO, Tony Espinoza.

The process of hiring for this position was involved and thoughtful. It was crucial to us to find someone who really understood CouchSurfing, our mission, and our community. We also needed someone with the technical knowledge and experience to bring the CouchSurfing website to a whole new level of quality and functionality. Tony stood out from the many people that we interviewed because he exhibits all of those traits.

In the coming weeks, you’ll begin seeing some of his vision for the website and how we can better serve you, our community. We’ll be sharing more information as we work. But for now, we wanted you to have the chance to “meet” Tony and see why we chose him for this important job.

Best wishes,

Casey Fenton

Daniel Hoffer

CouchSurfing Co-Founders

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CHANGES WITHIN THE COMMUNITY BUILDER PROGRAM May 24, 2012

Last week, information went out to CouchSurfing’s Community Builders and Ambassadors explaining that we are making some pretty big changes to the Community Builder program. Several of the teams will be closed, and several others are becoming much smaller. This is a big deal for CouchSurfing. Volunteers have had a huge hand in building and maintaining the CS website and community. Here’s some more information on this transition.

Which teams will be closed?

The Locations Team, which maintains CouchSurfing’s geographic database; the Groups Management Team, which maintains the discussion forums; the Event Message Approval Team, which makes sure event invitations are high quality and not spam; and the Verifications Team, which helps answer member questions about verifications.

Why?

The CouchSurfing website, as many of you know, is an old and complicated system. It’s still based on code that our co-founder, Casey, started programming in his apartment ten years ago. That was back towards the end of the first .com boom, when the social web was still a long ways away.

It was a good system for the time, but a lot has happened in the last ten years. Sites these days are faster and more reliable than they used to be. They incorporate mobile. And, where older sites were hierarchical collections of static information that put a lot of the work onto the user, newer sites are built to intelligently deliver information.

The CouchSurfing community has managed to create incredible connections even using an older site model, and these teams were a huge part of the reason why. They did the manual maintenance that was necessary to make these systems work. From painstakingly adding new locations individually to the database, to reading through event invitations, to managing group posts and threads by hand, to answering important member questions, these teams put in the effort to make an old machine run.

Now, though, we think it’s time that the site evolve to a point where as much as possible of that work is done through technology, rather than by members and teams. Our teams did an incredible job of handling the inconveniences of the older systems as quickly as possible for members. If we can remove the inconveniences in the first place, which we should be able to do with new technology, then that’s even better.

The engineering team is currently at work on a massive upgrade to the site that will make this possible. When it launches, some of this manual assistance will not be necessary.

We’re still incredibly grateful to everyone who has helped make the older systems work for so long. The new technology won’t need the same kind of manual oversight, but there will always be a need for leaders within the CS community. As we move forward, we are looking for ways that people who want to continue contributing to CS will be able to do so. We’ve recently hired a new manager for the Ambassador program. He has a great deal of experience working with large groups of contributors, and we can’t wait to see his ideas for how we can best give people opportunities to support the CouchSurfing mission in ways that reach beyond the administration of the website. You’ll be hearing more about this as it progresses. In the meantime, if you have ideas, please let us know at ambassadors@couchsurfing.org

Which teams are becoming smaller?

The Translations team and the Contact Us team have both been scaled down to the most active participants. Why? Smaller teams, we think, will lead to better communication. The hope is that with just a few people involved in each, it will be easier for Mario and the others in the community branch to have strong relationships with each individual.

What should you do if I’d like to be more involved in CouchSurfing?

Keep your eyes on this space for more information both about our site upgrade and about the future of the Ambassador program.

Thanks so much for being involved, and for everything you do, from me and from the rest of the CouchSurfing team. Many more updates are to come.

(http://blog.couchsurfing.org/changes-within-the-community-builders-program)

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HOFFER AND FENTON WITHDRAWING FROM OPERATIONS June 28, 2012

Dan and Casey have decided that it's time to start working on their next big contributions to the world. They've asked me to post the following letter, which you can also see on the website. We're really excited to see what these incredibly talented guys come up with next, and are also so appreciative of their continued involvement as we move forward. Thanks, Casey & Dan!

Dear CouchSurfers,

Thirteen years ago, CouchSurfing was nothing but an idea and a project that I worked on from home in the evenings and on weekends. Now CouchSurfing is woven into the lives of millions of people and we have a full-time staff of nearly 30 employees. I have actually been able to witness a dream become reality and grow into a movement that has changed my life, and the lives of many. I feel so very lucky and grateful to share this experience with you all.

I’m proud to see how much momentum this idea has gained, and I feel confident in the team that has been built to support it. Some of our staff members have been around since the earliest days of our community. Others are new to us and bring with them decades of experience in their fields. All of them are talented, committed people who have the expertise and the heart that the CouchSurfing community needs behind it. I see great things in store for the community.

With such a great team in place, from here on out Dan and I are stepping back from the day-to-day tasks involved in operating the company. We’ll still be very much involved, on a strategic level, in our roles as members of the Board of Directors. But it’s time for us to get some new ideas out into the world. For many years, we’ve put in countless hours of overtime building CouchSurfing. Now that it’s launched, we’re both looking forward to being creative once again. There are many ways to change the world, and we each have more projects that we’d like to see come to life.

One of those projects is CERI, the CouchSurfing Cultural Exchange Research Institute. The CouchSurfing community has demonstrated so much about the nature of trust, generosity, and friendship. There are lessons there that can have a huge amount of positive impact on the world. CERI will focus on concrete research that can help spread intercultural understanding and appreciation of diversity, based on those lessons. I’m very excited to get this new endeavor off the ground.

Dan and I are overflowing with love for this truly inspirational community and we’ll continue to do everything we can to ensure a great future for all of us. Naturally, there will be opportunities and challenges as we chart our course towards CS’s vision of a better world. That’s where we will always be involved: in making the best strategic decisions to support our community. I am proud that, as a socially-responsible B corp, we have a responsibility to our mission and values that goes beyond the scope of most companies. The magic that defines CouchSurfing is something that I believe in and will always champion.

I am grateful to each and every one of you for being part of this incredible movement, and I’m excited to keep adventuring with you. Thanks for dreaming with me!

Happy surfing,

Casey Fenton

Chairman, Board of Directors

CouchSurfing International

(http://blog.couchsurfing.org/an-update-from-hq)

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CouchSurfing

• CS Organization

CouchSurfing raises $15 million to improve our website and mobile apps!

Aug 22, 2012 by CouchSurfing Team - 205 Comments

Today, we announced that we have raised $15 million in funding. This is exciting news! It means that we can keep our energy where it belongs: on rebuilding the website and enhancing our mobile apps so that they better support our community. This financing gives us the time we need to approach that project carefully and strategically.

Of course you’ll want to know: Who’s funding us now? Are they trustworthy?

Yes; we’re happy to have found partners who are familiar with and supportive of our mission. Our lead investor and newest member of our Board of Directors, Jonathan Teo of General Catalyst Partners, has been a CouchSurfing member since 2009. “I’ve had a number of meaningful connections with people and places around the country and around the world thanks to CouchSurfing,” he says. “I know that the talents and resources of the General Catalyst team can help bring the same inspiring experiences to even more people.”

We’re also excited to receive backing from Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures, who has participated in funding other sharing economy organizations, like TaskRabbit (which lets people hire strangers to complete small jobs for them) and Getaround (a peer-to-peer car sharing company). And our initial investors from last year, Matt Cohler at Benchmark Capital and Todor Tashev at Omidyar Network, are also continuing their support.

$15 million gives us enough money to maintain our current staff and add new employees without needing to worry about our finances. Which is great, because there are two things we know for sure right now:

1. The CouchSurfing website, as it currently exists, needs a lot of help. It’s unstable and not very easy to use.

2. CouchSurfing is amazing because it’s free and based on generosity.

This new round of funding gives us the opportunity to deal with the first reality without messing around with the second, and for that we are extremely pleased. Our priority is to make sure that we’re serving the community as best we can. And we now have enough money in the bank that we can give that our full attention.

We’re lucky to exist in a really creative, experimental environment here in California and we’ve found investors who believe in us and our ideas.

So we’re focusing all our energy on making a website that’s a more sustainable home for our community: one that works reliably, and easily. It’s going to be a big project, and one that will take us a lot of time, but we’re now in a position where we can take that time and do it right.

Within the next few months, you’ll start seeing changes on the website. We’ll be launching something new to CouchSurfing: place pages. Local communities will have one centralized place to share their photos, discussions, and things to do. It’s just the first step towards making it easier to do what you need to do on the website, so you can spend less time surfing the web and more time surfing couches.

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• CS Organization

What does more funding mean for CouchSurfing? — A conversation with CEO Tony Espinoza

Aug 24, 2012 by Meredith Hutcheson - No Comments

Today we announced that we’ve raised $15 million in additional funding. It’s a big announcement and understandably members have a lot of questions. Tony Espinoza, CouchSurfing’s CEO, and I had a meeting so that we could talk about it.

Our investors want to see CouchSurfing become something that really revolutionizes how people travel and connect.

Meredith: So one thing that people are understandably skeptical about is how we’re going to eventually earn money as a company. Can you share how you’re thinking about our business model going forward?

Tony: I think that we probably will end up launching something within the next year, whatever it is. But I really think the website needs to work. It just needs to work well. Whether it’s fancy or not I don’t know, but it should just work, it should be there, it should not be going down, the results should make sense and help you meet people. Ironically at this moment we’re reaching the next level but it also represents going back to basics. Our website is a toolkit that lets people get offline and meet each other. That’s what we need to focus on.

We’re definitely not planning to do something like putting advertising up, or anything else that takes away from the experience or damages the community. We know that surfing and hosting needs to be free. So we have a lot of awareness of what we can’t do. Next step is figuring out what we can and should do.

Meredith: One big question that people have is, what do the investors want? It’s not a gift, obviously, it’s an investment, and I think there’s a lot of concern about what kinds of expectations these people who have given us all this money will have.

Tony: There are all different kinds of investors in the world. If you look through all of our individual investors, you will find consistent track records of believing in technology’s ability to change the world. And not because technology is so great in and of itself, but because people use it, and people use it on a global mass scale. And when they use it that way, and they use it for social purposes, it becomes a fabric that enables things to happen. Investors benefit from change. They invest because ideas grow and have impact. But things won’t grow if they aren’t working.

There are two types of investors. There are what we think of as “investor types” and there are company builders. And those are pretty different mindsets. An investor type is looking at market forces, these trajectories, how things are happening. Company builders have a belief in the model that a company can become really great at something, and if it has the right focus and the right execution then it can become increasingly relevant over time. So company builders look at really broad trends and ask themselves, “Is this part of the world changing? And in what ways does this company fit in? Is it becoming increasingly relevant over time, or neutral?”

Meredith: So you put a lot of work into finding the right investors, people that you thought were well suited to how we want to do things. I know you’ve also made sure that they really understand us and how we’re not just a company or a website, we’re representing this big living culture.

Tony: What I like about the set of people we have in the company is I think that we’re very well aligned in wanting to build something meaningful; because it has impact, and because it’s relevant on a global basis. There are a lot of companies that get funded around here that are all about technology, all about Silicon Valley. And that’s great, but anyone we’ve brought in to invest in CouchSurfing understands that we’re not about that, that we’re really about connecting every country and every culture, and the only reason that technology is relevant is because it enables us to reach everyone, and because it’s become part of our lives every day. In that way it’s vital, and we’re making this next step so that we’re really competent and capable of supporting a network of that scale.

Meredith: We’re definitely in a really unique environment here, where people are putting money into these ideas rather than into some kind of concrete plan. Or at least it seems that way to me.

Tony: So traditionally the world has been driven by value chains. Where somebody makes something, somebody distributes it, somebody sells it to someone, somebody buys it. There’s been this distinction of either you’re on the production end or you’re on the consumer end of the spectrum. And I think the movement that we’re connected to, that’s much bigger than just CouchSurfing, although CouchSurfing lives and breathes it, is that everyone in our community is both. We’re creating experiences, and we’re also happily experiencing them ourselves. What the technology does is it takes out all the middle men, just destroys the value chain and says that people can reach one another and that we can build a system that makes that work really well. That’s such a fundamental shift economically in the way the world works that it creates a huge amount of opportunity.

CouchSurfing already has something that nobody else has. It already has changed the world. And that’s extremely valuable. Our investors want to see CouchSurfing become something that really revolutionizes how people travel and connect. They’re looking at the power of that idea to create something totally new and essential.

Meredith: So how would you summarize what this means for us, getting the new round of funding? You mentioned that it’s a step forward but it’s also a return to basics; could you go back to that and talk a little bit more about what this moment is about for the organization and for the community?

Tony: I want us to start thinking about next June, now. And deliver on that, and match what we do with what we’re saying, and give people stuff that’s going to come true. This is going to be a steady process. We’re in it, we’ve gone from thinking about weeks and months to thinking about the next two years. We’re thinking about CouchSurfing as something that we can think about long term, not just handling where we’re at right now.

Beginning this fall, we’re really going to be strengthening the tools that are available on the website. Making them more reliable, making them easier to use. By having this new platform [Ed. note: the new code base that the engineering team is building] we will finally be able to operate in a way that’s not based on building features, but actually a process of iterating on our service, responding to things that aren’t working the way we hoped and constantly improving things. So instead of working in a vacuum, for the first time we’ll really be able to build something dynamically with the community, and respond, and be involved so that things continually get better.

Meredith: When you say working with the community, what will that look like? What are your plans to improve that conversation?

Tony: Building things that people use and using the analytics to understand what is and isn’t working is really vital. Because there’s an answer as to whether or not this solution is better than that, or what have you. But it’s not actually possible from my experience to iterate or tune your way to a major shift. So you do two things at the same time. You have to actually take risks and innovate and try things that are non-linear. And then on top of that you’ve got to be able to twist and turn and optimize and test your way to something better. So we have to do both. The non-linear pieces come from our ability to understand what people really are doing in the system and want to be able to do, and so that comes from being CouchSurfers ourselves and from working closely with CouchSurfers. How we actually make it easy, approachable, functional, fluid, efficient, those are things we can get from metrics. But a lot of the big ideas really do have to come from CouchSurfers. We need to make sure we are working on better ways to get those ideas to the surface, and that’s something I want to be sure we do.

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• CS Organization

More information on our new Privacy Policy and Terms of Use

Sep 21, 2012 by Meredith Hutcheson - No Comments

Read this Deutschen or Français

Recently, we announced that we’re updating our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use to bring them up to date with our new services, such as the mobile apps, and US privacy law. Since then, we’ve seen that, of members who have concerns, many of them are centered around the same topics. Privacy is very important to us, and we recognize that policies like these have a lot of information to wade through.

The primary comments and concerns that we’ve received are about our license to use member data. After discussing this with many community members, it’s clear that it’s necessary to provide some more clarity on what the license does, how it’s limited, and how we can and can’t use data.

Our license provides us:

1. The right to use content for our services

The top question by far is about why we have the type of license that we do, as mentioned in our Terms of Use. Licenses are standard legal terms that are needed for a company such as ours to do things like display member content on our website, www.couchsurfing.com, and store it on our servers. Members own and continue to own all of the information they upload to the website. Therefore, in order to display that content to other people (for example, a member profile page), we need permission to do so. That’s what this license accomplishes.

2. The ability to retain data for safety purposes

Although the wording of our license is not uncommon, it differs from some others. The reason for this is that, being a unique type of community, we have different needs from most other websites. For example, it is our policy that members can only have one profile, ever, to be sure that people stand by the reputation they build. When a repeat profile is reported to us, we are only able to verify that information by checking against deleted data. Having the broad member license allows us to do this to support the integrity of our reputation system. This isn’t a need that many websites have.

3. A broad platform to innovate

Another unique aspect of CouchSurfing, which anyone who’s been around for a bit knows all too well, is that we have a backlog of years’ worth of great ideas from the community that we have yet to implement. We’re expanding our team, moving faster, and want to get new things out there. Our plan changes all the time as we assess the community’s interests and our own capabilities. We want to be able to do something as big as rideshare or as small as a hosting calendar — whatever would be the best thing at the time — without needing to go through a new legal process each time.

Our privacy policies, and the legal system they operate within, limit our use of your information to protect your privacy:

That said, it is important to note that this member license does not mean that we can do whatever we want with member information. We are very committed to protecting member privacy, and our stance on user protection and experience has not changed. It’s important to understand that our use of your information is constrained by our Privacy Policy, and also by US privacy law.

Participation in the EU-US Safe Harbor Privacy Principles

We have now also finished the process required to participate in the EU-US Safe Harbor Privacy Principles. This optional step holds us legally responsible to the guiding principles of the European Data Protection Directive. Although it would be impossible for us to take similar steps in every country where we have members, the EU is well known for having very well-developed privacy law. We are applying these principles across the board, even to members in other regions of the world.

Your data is not for sale

As a result of these different layers of compliance and interaction between our policies, it is easy to reach the conclusion that we can use individual data far more freely than we actually a can. A few clarifications on what is and is not legally possible:

• We have committed in our Privacy Policy not to sell or transfer individual data to advertisers or marketers without first notifying members and allowing them to opt out. Different regulatory agencies in the US and Europe hold us legally responsible for upholding our policy. We think it would be ethically wrong for us to sell or transfer your data to advertisers or similar commercial interests without your knowledge, which is why we’ve made this commitment.
• We can’t use your individual data for our own or others’ promotional/marketing without giving you the tools and options to control that. For example, at some points we may want to send you marketing emails. And in the past, we have featured members’ photos on the homepage. For uses like that, which may be considered promotional, we will give you the tools to control that. For any use outside of our services (such as if we decided to advertise CouchSurfing on other websites) we would need your express consent.
• We can transfer your data to third parties who help us provide our services. For example, if you get verified, we transfer your address to the company that sends our verification postcards. Or if you buy a CouchSurfing T-shirt, you do that using our gear shop partner. When this happens, these third parties have signed agreements to safeguard your data, and not to use it for any other purpose or share it with anyone else.
• We can share anonymized, amalgamated data with third parties. For example, we’ve worked in the past with researchers who investigated the development of trust amongst strangers; for their work, we shared anonymized information about member behavior.

Designed for transparency

These policies have been in the works for over six months; or, around the time we began developing our mobile apps. The new platforms meant that an update was necessary. Our legal team, working with many advisors, took the opportunity to give both policies a full and detailed evaluation to be sure that we included everything that we should.

It is crucial that these policies be as detailed as possible so that individuals can choose their own comfort level in regards to their online behavior.

At the same time, we recognize that it’s a lot of information to go over and digest. If you have questions, please feel free to contact us.

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