Viewbook

How Viewbook is run

What happens to your buyers' data, how the assistant is kept honest, and what we do so it is always up. Written for the person who has to sign.

Your data

• Kept for as long as you are a client. Every conversation, booking and document stays with your brokerage's record; the assistant reads a buyer's whole history with you, not a rolling window, so someone who returns months later is recognised and picked up where they left off.
• Separated by brokerage at every query. Listings, documents, buyers and messages carry your brokerage's identifier; document search, the assistant's prompt, dashboard pages and Property Passport pages are built only from your rows. An automated test plants a unique phrase in two test brokerages on every build and fails if either phrase reaches the other's prompt, search, pages or Passport.
• Where it lives. EU servers (Hetzner, Germany/Finland) on an encrypted volume; encrypted daily backups with an offsite copy; restores are tested. A UAE-hosted option is available as a custom hosting arrangement for clients who need residency. The data processing agreement states the controller/processor roles under the UAE PDPL and UK GDPR.
• Identity documents are refused: if a buyer sends a passport, ID card or visa, the assistant says once that we do not keep identity documents, and nothing is written to disk or read into an answer. The only identity detail ever asked for is an ID number for a community gate pass, when the viewing needs one.
• No training. Your data and your buyers' messages are not used to train any model, ours or a provider's.

Keeping the assistant honest

• Every fact it gives comes from your listing, your documents or your written rules, and the Property Passport shows the source. When something is not on file it says so and hands to a consultant; percentages, rates and legal thresholds it cannot source are removed before the message is sent.
• In the UAE a listing without an advertising permit number is never advertised: no price, no details, a holding page instead of a Passport.
• Abusive buyers are answered calmly twice, then the conversation stops and you are told; "stop" is honoured on the spot. The public assistant rules list everything it refuses.

Always up

• Two application instances behind a health-checked load balancer; releases roll one instance at a time and roll back automatically if the new one does not answer.
• Over 300 automated tests and a lint gate run before any release can reach the server.
• Every two hours an audit checks 57 things: services, certificates, security headers, file handles, database integrity, backups, the WhatsApp connection and each number's quality rating, DNS and mail records, the security posture of the server, and each brokerage's data hygiene. A new failure is emailed to us at once.
• If a message cannot be handled, the buyer gets an apology and your owner number gets the buyer's message within seconds; nothing is ever dropped silently.
• Security: key-only SSH with intrusion blocking, only ports 22/80/443 open, HSTS and clickjacking protection, secrets kept out of the codebase, an independent scan on 18 September 2026.

Independent checks you can run yourself

We do not buy trust seals. These three are free, run by someone other than us, and show today's result, not the day we took a screenshot:

• Qualys SSL Labs - the TLS configuration behind the padlock (certificate, protocols, HSTS).
• Mozilla HTTP Observatory - the security headers on every page. We publish the grade as it is; the remaining points need a stricter content policy on the dashboard, which is on the list.
• Google Safe Browsing - whether Google has ever flagged this site for malware, phishing or unwanted software.

WhatsApp messages are sent and received through Meta's official WhatsApp Business Platform (Cloud API), never through an unofficial client, so a client's number cannot be banned for the way we connect.

What we will tell you plainly

There is one production server today; a second, in a different data centre, is scheduled before our twentieth client. Portal enquiries reach us by email, the way portals deliver them to you, and are answered within a minute. Questions: hello@viewbook.app.