Maintaining data security with Smarty

The "fast lane" answer

Smarty doesn't sell, distribute, persist the storage of, or in any way abuse your data. You can read all the legal-ese about our practices in the Data Protection Policy.

If you're still concerned about how to keep your data extra secure while using our services, there are a few things to keep in mind.

The "scenic route" answer

Securely encrypted

Connect to our service using HTTPS to take advantage of industry-grade encryption at no extra cost. Then only your machines and the intended recipient (our machines) can read your encrypted data transmission.

No one sees your data

Since our servers are fully automated, no one will see the data that you send to us. It is all processed automatically. So, we help you to achieve your data governance goals.

We already know every address

Our database already has every address that the US Postal Service has, so your addresses are not new information for us.

Leave out names

The thing that you want to keep secure is the context: the names and other information associated with any given address. Since the recipient name is of no value as input to our service, you can just submit a unique identifier (ID) with the address, city, state, and ZIP. This way, you haven't exposed anything sensitive or private to our secure servers.

Complete anonymity

If you really need to make sure that no one here can tie address data back to you, you can take steps to help anonymize your requests. For example, set up an account with our service using a disposable email address that you create on a computer at a public library, and then pay for our services with a prepaid credit card that you pay cash for at an airport convenience store that is nowhere near your business location. Also, you'll want to ensure that you send all your requests to our API through an anonymous proxy.

If you did that, the only info that we would derive from your request would look something like this:

20120317_1732_34|89374223|234.56.123.06|13

And if we log stuff like this, it's only looked at when we need to improve our service.

We're committed to private and secure communications on the internet, and our API service is no exception. Please take the steps necessary to ensure your transmissions and data are secure and we will do everything feasible to make sure that your data is safe on our end.