Genie builds and runs web applications for people who do not employ anybody to look after software. This page is what that means for the information your application ends up holding: how much protection it gets, who can unlock it and who is watching it while you are not.
Sized to the job
A shop window is a shop window. Your opening hours and a photo of the counter do not need locking in a safe, and anyone who sells you one is selling you something you will pay for twice, once in money and once in it being slower and more annoying to use.
The moment somebody types their name and number into it, that changes. Now you are holding something that belongs to another person, and there are rules about that in Europe. So it gets built differently: the information locked away, the copies taken, who can see what decided on purpose rather than by accident.
What decides it is not what you ask for. It is what the app ends up holding. That question gets asked at the start, in plain English, before anything is built, because it is the one answer everything else is built on top of.
When it is other people's private business
A solicitor's files. A doctor's notes. A therapist's appointments. If that is what your app holds, the honest question is not whether it is encrypted. Everything is encrypted. The question is who can unlock it, and that is a choice we put in front of you instead of making it for you.
You hold the key
You set a password for your app, and it never leaves your browser. Your computer works out the key from it and sends us only that, so the password itself never reaches us. It is combined with a second piece that we hold, kept deliberately outside the database your information lives in. Neither piece opens anything on its own, and we only ever have one of them. So while your app is asleep, nobody here can read a word of it. Not an engineer, not an administrator, and not anyone walking off with a copy of the database.
The cost of that is real and you should hear it now rather than later. If your app restarts at three in the morning, it comes back locked and stays locked until you next open it. It will not quietly serve anybody in the meantime, because it cannot. For work where that is the right trade, it is the right trade.
And if you lose your password and your recovery key, your information is gone. Not delayed. Gone. We cannot get it back for you, and you should not want to use anyone who says they can, because being able to rescue you means being able to read you.
We hold the key
Your information is locked away, and we keep what unlocks it. Your app comes back on its own at three in the morning and you never think about any of this. What you are giving up is the part above: with this option we could open your information if we chose to, and we would rather say that plainly than dress it up.
For most people this is the right answer. We have run other people's information for twenty years, and our background is building systems for banks and financial institutions. The locking, the backups and the watching are the same either way. The only thing that changes is who can open it.
If you hold files under professional privilege, that is not a judgement call about how much you trust a supplier. It is a duty you owe your clients, and it is stricter than the trust you place in an accountant or a bank. If that is your position, take the first option. It exists for you.
You are not stuck with the answer you give on day one. It is a setting, and it is yours.
The other thing nobody tells you
The usual way this goes is you buy software, and then you find out you also needed somebody to look after it. Genie is the software and the somebody.
Every day it takes a complete copy of your application and everything in it, and keeps the last two weeks of them. If something ever needs putting back, it goes back to the way it was on the day you pick, and it takes a fresh copy before it does that, so the undo has an undo.
It also watches the thing while you are not looking, every few minutes. Not whether a machine somewhere is switched on, which is what most people mean by monitoring, but whether your application is actually doing its job. Did the jobs you set up run. Is anything sitting waiting on your say so for longer than it should. Did last night's copy really happen. Is the address still answering when somebody clicks your link. If one of those stops being true you get an email about it, in normal words, without having to notice anything yourself.
Genie is written and run by a team of security experts and senior developers whose background is building financial systems, where the cost of getting this part wrong is somebody else's money. It is not a robot left running on its own. People whose profession this is answer for it.
When it reads a page, it keeps the page. The address, the time it looked and a copy of exactly what that page said that day. So when somebody argues with you six months later, you've got it.
Nothing goes out to anyone without you seeing it first. And when it isn't sure, it stops and asks you, instead of making up something that sounds right.