Privacy & data residency
The short version:
- Your primary data lives in AWS Frankfurt (
eu-central-1) — a GDPR-grade EU region — encrypted at rest, with inbound email intake processed in AWS Sydney (ap-southeast-2). That is where the platform, the public sandbox and all demo data run today. Customers are deployed in their own region when they sign up: Australian agencies in AWS Sydney; a dedicated deployment in AWS Bahrain or UAE is available on request for Gulf contracts. Your order confirmation names the region. - We name every place your data goes. Two subprocessors touch data beyond AWS: Anthropic (US) for AI processing of minimised fields, and Resend (US) for outbound email delivery. Nothing else — no analytics platforms, no marketing partners.
- Our public website counts visits without cookies. pmfriend.com and this guide use cookie-less, aggregated page analytics (Cloudflare Web Analytics): no cookies, no cross-site tracking, no consent banner needed. It never runs inside the app and never sees your agency's data.
- AI requests are minimised. Each AI feature sends only the fields it needs (e.g. triage sees the report text and photos, never the tenant's contact details) — see the table below.
- AI providers don't train on your data. Contractually excluded.
- The AI model can be changed for your account. A different model, or your own model endpoint, can be configured per customer on request.
- You own your data. Export your records to CSV at any time, without asking.
Who is responsible
For this website, the guide you are reading and your PMFriend user account, the controller under the GDPR
(Art. 13) is Dmytro Rybka, a sole proprietorship (Einzelunternehmen) registered in Germany, Im Hoffeld 31/1,
74427 Fichtenberg, Germany, support@pmfriend.com (Impressum). For the data your
company puts into PMFriend (tenants, owners, contractors, jobs), your company is the controller and PMFriend acts as
its processor, as described below.
What "data" means here
Three categories:
- Agency operational data — properties, owners, tenants, contractors, maintenance, inspections, compliance, notices, case packs.
- Identifying data — names, emails, phone numbers, addresses.
- AI request logs — what we sent to the AI provider on your behalf, kept for 30 days for debugging then deleted.
Categories 1–2 live in the Frankfurt database; raw inbound emails land in Sydney; AI requests transit to Anthropic with the minimised fields above.
Who can see your data
Within PMFriend:
- Your team — anyone you've invited as Agency Admin or PM. Read-only members can see but not edit.
- PMFriend's support team — only when you ask us to look at something specific (e.g. "this report is missing rooms"). Every such access is logged in our audit log and we can show you what was viewed.
- Nobody else. Not other agencies, not analytics platforms, not marketing partners.
We do not:
- Sell or share your data with anyone
- Use your data for marketing analysis
- Pool your data with other agencies' data for cross-tenant features
- Train any AI model on your data
What goes to the AI, per feature
The AI provider is Anthropic (Claude). Each feature sends only what that task needs:
| Feature | Sent to the AI | Not sent |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance triage | the report text and up to 3 photos the tenant attached | tenant name, phone, email, property address, history |
| Email and WhatsApp sorting | the subject and message body as written (a voice note is sent as its transcript) | the sender's phone or email, other messages |
| Worker task translation | the job's scope text | tenant and owner identity |
| Owner updates | the owner's first name; suburb and property type; short excerpts of requests; work-order scope and cost; compliance item names and dates | contact details, street addresses |
| Legal notices (Australia) | tenant name, property address, amounts, dates — a notice must be addressable | email, mobile, payment history |
| Tribunal and RDSC dispute packs | the chronology, tenant name and property address | tenant email and mobile, contractor contacts |
| Import from contracts | the whole contract you upload (reading it is the task) | nothing is kept from it except the fields you confirm; ID numbers, bank details and signatures are never read back; unconfirmed uploads are deleted after 30 days |
Message text is sent as written. If a tenant types a name or a phone number into a message, it travels with that message; PMFriend does not run automatic redaction on free text. Voice notes are transcribed by Amazon Transcribe inside AWS before any AI step.
The ChatGPT / Claude connector for your director never returns tenant names or phone numbers — only property addresses, counts, statuses and contractor business names. Ask your portfolio →
Qatar — Personal Data Privacy Protection Law (Law 13/2016)
- Roles: your company is the controller; PMFriend is your processor and acts only on your instructions.
- Cross-border processing: data is processed in AWS Frankfurt (EU), with inbound email in AWS Sydney and AI processing by Anthropic (US). We give your procurement a transfer-impact summary with every proposal and support any notification or approval route your counsel requires.
- In-Gulf hosting: a dedicated deployment in AWS Bahrain or UAE is available on request for your contract.
- Data-subject requests: handled through you, within 30 days.
- Breach: we tell you within 72 hours of confirming a breach that affects your data, and support your notifications.
Australia — Australian Privacy Principles
PMFriend handles personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). Specifically:
- APP 5 (notification of collection) — when a tenant submits a report through our form, the form tells them their data is shared with their property manager and is held by PMFriend.
- APP 8 (cross-border disclosure) — we disclose exactly where data is processed: AWS Frankfurt (primary), AWS Sydney (email intake), Anthropic US (AI, minimised fields), Resend US (email delivery) — each under contractual processing limits, and none training on your data.
- APP 11 (security) — encrypted in transit (HTTPS) and at rest (AWS managed keys). 14-day point-in-time recovery for backups.
- APP 12 (access on request) — anyone whose data we hold can email
support@pmfriend.com; we extract their data within 30 days.
We are not a Privacy Act exempt small business — we treat APP compliance as a baseline regardless.
Tenant data specifically
Tenants are the most-protected class of person in the system because they have the least leverage. Specifically:
- Tenants don't see other tenants' data. Each property's submission flow is fully isolated.
- Tenants can request deletion at lease end. Subject to statutory retention — in Australia each state's agents legislation sets its own period (three years in NSW, five in Queensland, six in WA, seven in Victoria); in Qatar, records you may need for an RDSC matter — anything required by law stays, the rest is deleted.
- AI requests for triage see only the report text and any photos the tenant attached. They don't see the tenant's name, contact, the property address or other history.
Owner data
- Your owners' contact details are held to facilitate communications you initiate.
- We don't email owners unless your PM has approved + sent the email.
- Owners can request a data export the same way tenants can.
Contractor data
- Contractor details (business name, ABN or CR number, insurance dates, ratings) are stored at the agency level. Other agencies cannot see them.
- Magic-link tokens are scoped to a single work order and expire after 14 days.
- Contractor accounts have no persistent login — they identify via the one-time URL.
Backup + recovery
- AWS RDS automated backups are kept 14 days, with point-in-time recovery to any second within that window.
- Manual snapshots are kept indefinitely (we use these before risky operations like DB schema migrations).
- Backups are stored in the same region as the live database (Frankfurt). No cross-region replication today.
Cancellation + data return
You don't have to wait for us: an agency admin can download the full export (a ZIP of spreadsheets, one per entity) from Settings at any time — see Your data, exportable.
When you cancel:
- Download your export from Settings (or ask us and we'll send it within 7 business days as an encrypted ZIP).
- We retain your data for 30 days in case you change your mind.
- After 30 days, your operational data is permanently deleted.
- Trust ledger items your state's agents legislation requires you to keep — none of which PMFriend holds anyway, since they live in your PMS — are excluded from the 30-day clock.
Data breach response
If we ever have a data breach affecting your data, we will:
- Tell you within 72 hours of confirming the breach.
- Tell affected individuals if the breach meets the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme threshold.
- Tell the OAIC if applicable.
- Publish a public timeline of what happened, what was affected, and what we changed.
We've never had one. Watching to make sure that stays true.