Terms of Service

1. About these Terms and who we are

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between you and the people who run UniPortal. They apply when you use the UniPortal website and app at https://uniportal.io (the "Service"). Please read them with our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

UniPortal is run by a team of five individuals studying at Trinity College Dublin. We operate together as an unincorporated team. In these Terms, "UniPortal", "we", "us" and "our" mean these five people acting together:

• Adam Bandyk
• George Adadi
• Kashmala Aamir
• Robin Schulz
• Vlad Postolachi

You can contact us at team@uniportal.io, or by post at UniPortal, c/o Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2, D02 PN40, Ireland.

UniPortal is independent. Trinity College Dublin, your home university and any host university do not operate, endorse or check UniPortal or its content. We use a Trinity College Dublin postal address only for correspondence. Nothing on UniPortal is an official statement by any university or by the Erasmus+ programme.

You accept these Terms when you create an account. If you use UniPortal without an account, these Terms apply to that use too. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

2. Who can use UniPortal and your account

You must be 16 or older to create an account. By signing up, you confirm that you are 16 or older. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will delete it.

When you create an account, you agree to:

• give your real email address, and an email address that belongs to you;
• give accurate information about your studies and exchange, because the Service relies on it (for example, to decide whether you can review an institution);
• keep your password secret, and tell us at once if you think someone else has used your account;
• hold only one account, and use it only for yourself.

You are responsible for what happens in your account, unless it happens because we failed to keep the Service secure.

You can use some parts of UniPortal without an account. Without an account, you can open up to two institution profiles in each 24-hour period, and read two reviews for each institution. After that, we ask you to sign up.

3. What UniPortal is

UniPortal helps students research and prepare for an Erasmus exchange. It is free to use. The Service currently includes institution search and a map, institution profiles, alumni reviews, saved institutions and shareable shortlists, an exchange checklist, deadline alerts, and recommendations.

UniPortal is a research aid, not an official source. Your home university and your host university decide nominations, admission, module approval and credit recognition. Always check deadlines, requirements and module choices with them before you act.

We take reasonable care to keep information accurate. However, institution information can change without notice, and some of it comes from other people. In particular:

• Where institution information comes from. We compile institution information from public sources and feedback from exchange alumni. Public sources include institutions' own web pages, fact sheets and partner lists, Erasmus+ registers, and the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER) for statistics. Statistics can be several months to years old.
• AI-assisted descriptions. Some institution descriptions are summaries that our team prepared with the help of an AI language model, from the institution's own public web pages. A team member checks each one before we publish it. We regularly validate the quality of descriptions with exchange alumni. Summaries can still contain errors or leave out details.
• Checklists and deadlines. Checklists and deadlines are general guidance, based on our team's reading of public information. We regularly validate the quality of checklists with exchange alumni. We cannot guarantee, however, that they fully match your own university's process. Always check with your qualified exchange coordinators.
• Recommendations. Recommendations are suggestions made on the premise of 1) Erasmus guidelines and 2) your home university's data, both modelled by us into the product. We calculate them with fixed rules from the details in your profile (see our Privacy Policy). We cannot guarantee, however, that a recommendation makes you eligible, or that an institution will accept you. Always check with your qualified exchange coordinators.
• Reviews. Reviews are the personal opinions of their authors, not our opinions (see section 4).

We are not responsible for decisions that you make based only on UniPortal without checking with your university. Section 10 explains our liability.

We may add features, change features or remove features. If we plan to charge for any feature in the future, we will tell you in advance. We will not charge you for anything unless you clearly agree to pay.

4. Reviews

Who can write a review. You can review an institution if your profile says that it was your host institution, and the exchange end date in your profile has passed. You can write one review in total. You cannot review your home institution.

How we check reviews. We do not verify reviews. We do not check your enrolment, your exchange or your identity with any university. A review is eligible only because of the details that its author entered in their profile. Writing a review about an exchange that you did not take part in breaks these Terms.

What we show publicly. When you post a review, anyone who visits UniPortal can see:

• your review title, text and ratings, and the overall rating that we calculate from them;
• the name in your UniPortal profile;
• your home institution, your subject area and your exchange period by month and year;
• the date that you posted the review.

We publish reviews immediately and do not edit them. We show them newest first. We do not rank, filter or hide reviews because they are positive or negative, and nobody pays us to publish or remove a review.

Changing or removing your review. You can edit or delete your review by tapping on the three-dot icon button and choosing your desired action. If you delete your account, your review stays on UniPortal, but we replace your name with "Anonymous". Your home institution, subject area and exchange period stay visible, so people who know you may still recognise you. If you do not want this, ask us to remove the review before or after you delete your account.

Your rights in your review. You keep ownership of your review. You give us a free, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to host, display, copy and adapt it (for example, to fit a screen or to show an extract) to run and promote UniPortal. This licence continues for as long as the review is on UniPortal, including after your account is deleted, until the review is removed. We do not sell your reviews.

Review rules. Your review must:

• describe your own honest experience of that institution;
• not include the name, contact details or other personal information of other people, such as staff or other students;
• not include sensitive information about yourself or others (for example, about health, religion or sexuality), unless you are comfortable for everyone to read what you share about yourself;
• follow the acceptable use rules in section 6.

We may remove a review that breaks these rules (see section 7).

5. Feedback, suggestions and shared shortlists

Page feedback. You can report incorrect information on an institution page, suggest a correction, and add up to three screenshots. Only our team sees this feedback. Before you upload a screenshot, remove or cover anything personal, such as student numbers, grades, or other people's names and emails. We will email you when we fix the issue that you reported.

Suggesting an institution. You can suggest an institution that is missing from UniPortal. If you tick "I work here", the role, work email and phone number that you give must be your own, and you must actually work at that institution. Do not enter someone else's contact details.

Ideas that you send us. If you send us feedback, corrections or suggestions, we can use them to improve UniPortal without paying you or naming you.

Shared shortlists. When you click "Share shortlist", we create a public link to a page that shows your name and the institutions that you saved. Anyone who has the link can open the page, and they can pass the link on. The page may also show your name in link previews, for example in messaging apps. At present, you cannot switch off a link yourself. Email team@uniportal.io and we will switch it off, or delete your account. Share the link only with people that you trust.

6. Acceptable use

Use UniPortal lawfully and fairly. You must not post, upload or send content (in reviews, feedback, suggestions, screenshots or your profile name) that:

• is illegal, or encourages illegal activity;
• is defamatory, or states as fact something about a person or institution that you know or suspect is untrue;
• harasses, threatens, bullies or discriminates against anyone, or is hateful;
• shares another person's personal information without a lawful reason;
• infringes copyright, trade marks or other rights;
• is spam or advertising, or is paid for or written on behalf of an institution or agent;
• pretends to be another person or organisation.

You must not:

• create accounts with other people's email addresses, or create fake accounts;
• try to get into accounts, systems or data that you are not allowed to access, or test our security without our written permission;
• scrape, copy or extract UniPortal content or data in bulk, by automated means or otherwise, except as normal search engines do;
• interfere with the Service, overload it, or get around its limits (such as the limit on profiles for visitors without an account);
• use UniPortal content to build a competing product or dataset.

7. Reporting content and how we moderate

How to report content. If you think that a review or any other content on UniPortal is illegal, or breaks these Terms, email team@uniportal.io. Anyone can report content; you do not need an account. To help us act quickly, include:

1. the link (URL) to the page, and which review or text you mean;
2. why you think that it is illegal or breaks these Terms;
3. your name and email address (you may leave these out if you are reporting child sexual abuse material);
4. a statement that you believe, in good faith, that your report is accurate and complete.

What we do with a report. We confirm that we have received it. A team member then reviews the content, the report and these Terms. We do not use automated tools to moderate content; a person makes each decision. We aim to decide within 7 days, and sooner for urgent cases. We tell you what we decided and why.

What we can do. If content breaks the law or these Terms, we can remove it, hide it, or restrict who can see it. If someone breaks these Terms seriously or repeatedly, we can suspend or close their account. We may also act without a report, for example if we notice a problem ourselves.

If we act on your content. We tell you by email what we did, why we did it, which rule or law it concerns, and whether the decision followed a report. We do not do this if the law prevents it, for example in a police investigation.

If you disagree. Reply to our decision email, or write to team@uniportal.io, within 6 months. A team member who was not involved in the first decision, where possible, will review it and reply to you. You can also take the matter to a court.

Threats to life or safety. If content suggests a criminal offence that threatens someone's life or safety, we will tell the Gardaí or the police of the country concerned.

Contact point. team@uniportal.io is our single point of contact for users and for authorities under the EU Digital Services Act. You can write to us in English.

8. Intellectual property and third-party services

Our content. We own, or have permission to use, the UniPortal name, design, software, checklists, descriptions and other content that we created. You may use UniPortal for your own, non-commercial exchange research. You may share links and short extracts with others, for example with classmates. Do not copy, republish or sell our content without our written permission.

Other people's content. Institution names, logos and photos belong to the institutions or to their other owners. We show them only to identify the institutions. Statistics come from the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER). Reviews belong to their authors (section 4).

If you think that we use your work without permission. Email team@uniportal.io with the link to the content and the rights that you hold. We will review it and, where appropriate, remove the content.

Third-party services. Some features use services from other companies. These companies' own terms apply to your use of their services:

• Maps are provided by Google. If you turn on maps, you agree to the Google Maps/Google Earth Additional Terms of Service and acknowledge the Google Privacy Policy.
• The feedback form uses Cloudflare Turnstile to check that a person, as opposed to a bot, sends it.

UniPortal contains links to other websites, such as institutions' websites and our social media pages. We do not control those websites and are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices.

9. Availability, suspension and ending your use

Availability. UniPortal is a new service run by a small team. We try to keep it available and secure. However, it may sometimes be slow or unavailable, for example during maintenance or a fault, and we cannot promise that it will always work without errors. We may change or stop the Service. If we plan to close UniPortal, we will tell account holders by email at least 30 days in advance, where we can.

Ending your use. You can stop using UniPortal at any time. To close your account, go to Settings → Delete account. Our Privacy Policy explains what we delete and what we keep.

Suspension or closure by us. We can suspend or close your account if:

• you seriously or repeatedly break these Terms;
• we must do so because of the law, or because an authority tells us to;
• your account puts other users or the Service at risk, for example because someone else has taken control of it.

Unless the law prevents it, or it would put other people at risk, we will tell you why by email before we act, or at the time we act. You can ask us to review the decision as described in section 7.

10. Liability, your legal rights and other terms

Your legal rights. If you are a consumer, you have legal rights under consumer law, including the Consumer Rights Act 2022 in Ireland. Nothing in these Terms takes away or limits those rights.

What we are responsible for. We are responsible for loss or damage that you suffer because we break these Terms or fail to use reasonable care and skill, if that loss or damage was foreseeable. Loss or damage is foreseeable if it was obvious that it would happen, or if we both knew that it might happen when you started to use UniPortal.

What we are not responsible for. UniPortal is free and is for personal use. We are not responsible for:

• loss or damage that was not foreseeable;
• business losses, such as lost profit or lost business opportunities;
• decisions that universities make about you, such as nominations, admission or credit recognition;
• content written by other users, such as reviews, unless we did not act on a valid report as section 7 describes;
• problems caused by events outside our reasonable control.

What we never exclude. We do not exclude or limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to exclude or limit.

Changes to these Terms. We may update these Terms, for example when we add features or when the law changes. If a change is significant, we will tell account holders by email or in the app at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not agree with the change, you can delete your account before it takes effect. Each version shows its effective date at the top.

Transfer. If we set up a company to run UniPortal, we may transfer this agreement to that company. We will tell you if this happens, and it will not reduce your rights.

If part of these Terms is invalid. The rest of these Terms still applies.

Governing law and courts. Irish law governs these Terms, and the courts of Ireland can hear disputes about them. If you are a consumer who lives elsewhere in the EU, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of your country, and you can also bring a claim in the courts where you live.

Contact. Email team@uniportal.io, or write to UniPortal, c/o Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2, D02 PN40, Ireland.