Your users’ data never leaves our servers

We distinguish between data about your users and data about you, yourself. While, for example, your billing information is shared with Stripe, and your profile is accessible to us in our help desk software, any data about your users are never shared with any external providers, and never leaves our server cluster hosted with Amazon Cloud Platform.

We don’t collect information from your users’ browsers

When Ted Management System, System is installed in your school, the only information that’s required to be sent to Ted Management System, is the current user’s ID (or a hash of the ID, if you don’t want to share the ID either). Any user attributes you want to include is completely in your control. By default, Ted Management System, also tracks page views including the current URL, but this can be turned off. To be perfectly clear: Ted Management System, does not collect any information from your users’ browsers. All logic such as “whether an element is present” or “what the value of a text input is” is handled 100% client-side and never leaves the browser.

Encrypting data in transit

Whenever your data is in transit between you (or your users) and us, everything is encrypted, and sent using HTTPS. During a user agent’s (typically a web browser) first site visit, Ted Management System, sends a Strict Transport Security Header (HSTS) to the user agent that ensures that all future requests should be made via HTTPS even if a link to Ted Management System, is specified as HTTP. Additionally, we use HSTS preload, guaranteeing that requests are never – not even the very first – made over a non-encrypted connection. Cookies are also set with a secure flag.

Encrypting data at rest

Any files which you upload to us are stored and are encrypted at rest. Flows/tour content, user attributes and events (all stored in Amazon Cloud SQL) aren’t encrypted at rest — they are active in our database. Our backups of your data are encrypted.

Hosted on Amazon Cloud Platform

Ted Management System, is hosted on Amazon Cloud Platform. Our database is managed by Amazon Cloud SQL, ensuring redundancy, high availability and trustworthy automated, encrypted backups. Amazon Cloud Platform is certified for a growing number of compliance standards and controls, and undergoes several independent third party audits to test for data safety, privacy, and security. Read more about the specific certifications on the GCP compliance page.

Concurrency and rate limiting

We employ several layers to protect against abuse and DoS attacks, such as concurrency limiting (limits number of active requests) and rate limiting (limits number of requests over time). Our servers gracefully queue requests when under high load, and handles them at a safe pace.

Organizational practices

• We operate under the principle of least privilege: Employees are assigned the lowest level of access that allows them to do their work.
• Two-factor authentication is enforced in all sensitive systems.
• All employees are required to use approved password to generate and store strong passwords that are never reused.
• All employees are required to encrypt local hard drives and enable screen locking for device security.
• All access to application admin functionalities is restricted to a small subset of school staff.
• We never store customer data on personal devices (like laptops).

Development practices

• All code changes are thoroughly tested through our Continuous Integration software.
• All code changes is tested in a staging environment before deploying to production.
• We use automatic security vulnerability detection tools to alert us when our dependencies have known security issues.
• We use several tools and services to automatically monitor uptime and site availability.
• Key employees receive automatic email and SMS notifications in the case of downtime or emergencies.
• Logs are permanently deleted after 120 days.

Penetration testing

On top of our development-related continuous testing, we also conduct periodic third-party manual penetration testing of both our application and infrastructure. You can request a copy of our latest report at admin@ted.co.tz.

Regularly-updated infrastructure

Our software infrastructure is updated regularly with the latest security patches. Our products run on a dedicated network which is locked down with firewalls and carefully monitored. While perfect security is a moving target, we work with security researchers to keep up with the state-of-the-art in web security.

We protect your billing information

All credit card transactions are processed via Stripe using secure encryption—the same level of encryption used by leading banks. Card information is transmitted, stored, and processed securely on a PCI-Compliant network.

Have a concern? Need to report an incident?

Have you noticed abuse, misuse, an exploit, or experienced an incident with your account? Send urgent or sensitive reports directly to admin@ted.co.tz. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can, usually within 24 hours. Please follow up if you don’t hear back. For requests that aren’t urgent or sensitive: submit a support request. Keeping customer data safe and secure is a huge responsibility and a top priority. We work hard to protect our customers from the latest threats. Your input and feedback on our security is always appreciated.