Privacy policy

Who we are

Backscribe is operated by Resonator Consulting, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company. You can reach us about anything on this page at gerry@resonatorconsulting.com, or by post at 221 W 9th St, PMB 775, Wilmington, DE 19801.

Where a business connects Backscribe to its Salesforce org and its employees' mailboxes, that business decides what is collected and why. In data-protection terms it is the controller and we are its processor, acting on its instructions. For the information we hold about our own account holders and website visitors, we are the controller.

What the service does

Backscribe is a background service that connects a Google Workspace mailbox to a Salesforce org. It reads business email, works out which people, companies, and opportunities in Salesforce it relates to, and writes it into Salesforce as ordinary records that the organisation's own reports and automation can see.

There is nothing to install in the inbox. An administrator authorises access to the Salesforce org once, each person authorises access to their own mailbox once, and either authorisation can be withdrawn at any time.

Information we process

Depending on what has been connected and how an administrator has configured it:

• Account and identity information: your name, email address, and your Salesforce user and organisation identifiers.
• Mailbox information obtained through Google APIs: the sender, recipients, timestamps, message and thread identifiers, and headers of business email, together with message content at the moment it is synced.
• Salesforce information: the contact, lead, account, and opportunity records we read in order to work out what an email relates to.
• Operational records: an audit entry for each item explaining what happened to it and why, plus error reports and service logs.

What we store, and what we do not

This is the part worth reading closely, because the distinction matters.

We store addressing metadata on our own servers: who an email was between, when it was sent, its message and thread identifiers, the key used to prevent duplicates, and a one-way hash of the subject line. Subject lines themselves are stored only if the organisation's administrator has left them enabled; a strict mode stores participants and timestamps only, because some security teams reasonably treat a subject line as content.

We do not store message bodies or attachment contents on our servers. Bodies do, however, pass through the service while an item is being synced — they are read from the mailbox and written to Salesforce, and are not retained by us afterwards. We would rather say that plainly than imply we never encounter your email, which would not be true.

Content is also excluded from our logs and error reports by design, not by convention. Message bodies, subject lines, attachment filenames, and access credentials are stripped before anything is written to a log or sent to our error-reporting provider. Email addresses appear in logs only as their domain, with the person and the local part removed.

Google user data

Backscribe's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

In practice that means the data we obtain from Google is used only to provide the features described on this site, and specifically:

• It is not used for advertising, and it is not sold or transferred to data brokers or information resellers.
• It is not used to train generalised artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models.
• It is not read by our staff, except with your explicit permission for a support request you have raised, where it is necessary for security or to comply with the law, or where the data has been aggregated and made anonymous.
• We request the narrowest scopes that make the service work, and read-only access to mail.

Salesforce data

We read the parts of a Salesforce org needed to match activity to the right records, and we write email records into Salesforce.

Each person who wants Backscribe to write to Salesforce as them authorises that separately, on top of connecting their mailbox. Doing so stores that person's own Salesforce sign-in — a refresh token, encrypted the same way as the organisation's own — and records we create from their mail are then written under their own Salesforce login, so they appear in Salesforce as created by that person, with their own permissions, validation rules, and automation applying as they would to anything that person entered directly. The organisation's original, single connection stays in place alongside this: we still use it to read the org, and it remains the author of record for anything written before a person completed this step. If someone leaves the organisation, their administrator can revoke their stored Salesforce sign-in, which stops any further writes under their name.

Nothing is written to Salesforce without an explicit, recorded approval step while the service is in development.

Credentials and security

Authorisation tokens for Salesforce and for mailboxes are encrypted before they are stored, with the encryption key held separately from the database that holds the encrypted values, so that access to one is not access to the other. Tokens can be revoked by you at any time from your Google or Salesforce account, and revoking one stops the corresponding sync.

Data is encrypted in transit. Access to production systems is limited to people who need it to operate the service, and each of them is bound by a duty of confidentiality.

We do not hold a formal security certification today. We would rather state that than imply otherwise, and we will say so here when that changes.

Sub-processors

We use a small number of other companies to run the service:

Google, as the provider of the Gmail APIs we read from, and Salesforce, as the destination we write to, are not sub-processors of ours: your organisation connects each of them under its own agreement with that provider.

• Render — application hosting and the PostgreSQL database, in the United States.
• Google LLC — Google Cloud Key Management Service, which holds the keys that encrypt stored refresh tokens, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub, which carries mailbox change notifications, in the United States.
• Sentry — error reporting, configured to strip message content before anything is sent.

Retention and deletion

Metadata is kept for as long as the organisation's administrator has configured, and is purged automatically after that.

Disconnecting a mailbox deletes the items held for that mailbox. When an organisation stops using the service, we delete its data within 30 days. Before that deletion, an organisation can ask us for a copy of the metadata we hold for it, in a machine-readable form.

Records that have already been written into Salesforce belong to the organisation and live in its org; deleting data on our side does not remove them, and we cannot delete them on your behalf.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to receive a copy of it, or to object to how it is used.

If your employer connected Backscribe, they decide what is collected, so the quickest route is usually your own administrator — and where we act as their processor, we act on their instructions. You can always write to us at gerry@resonatorconsulting.com and we will help.

Where data is processed

The service runs in the United States. If you are outside the United States, information covered by this policy is transferred there. A European hosting option is on our roadmap and is not available today.

Children

Backscribe is a business product. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes we update the effective date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle information already collected, we will tell affected customers directly rather than relying on this page alone.

Contact

Questions, requests, and complaints about this policy go to gerry@resonatorconsulting.com, addressed to Resonator Consulting, LLC. By post: Resonator Consulting, LLC, 221 W 9th St, PMB 775, Wilmington, DE 19801. Email is the faster route; postal mail is scanned by our mailbox provider and can take a few days to reach us.