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Data Privacy and Security in Tern
Data Privacy and Security in Tern

How Tern protects your information including sensitive data like passport data and other private information.

David Shull avatar
Written by David Shull
Updated this week

Protecting your data and privacy is incredibly important to us at Tern. This document is meant to explain the technical steps Tern takes to protect your information. We encourage you to also ready our Privacy Policy which outlines how we use and protect your information from a legal and process perspective.

A security first architecture

Tern's world-class engineering team has experience working in highly sensitive data environments. From the first line of code written we've had protecting user's information in mind.

The Tern software runs on industry leading infrastructure. The physical data centers used to power Tern has been certified under various compliance standards including:

  • ISO 27001

  • SOC 1 and SOC 2/SSAE 16/ISAE 3402 (Previously SAS 70 Type II)

  • PCI Level 1

  • FISMA Moderate

  • Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)

Additionally our infrastructure provider provides DDoS mitigation, firewall based access restrictions, and spoofing and sniffing protections. Port scanning is prohibited and closely monitored by our infrastructure provider.

Your data is encrypted

Encryption protects your data from those who shouldn't have access to it. Tern uses industry leading data encryption technologies to ensure your data is safe within Tern.

  • In transit: Using TLS1.2 or Higher

  • At test on our servers: Using AES 256 or above

  • Application level for sensitive fields: Using AES encryption

This means that all data you share with Tern is protected using industry leading encryption.

An extra layer of protection for sensitive information

Extra sensitive information such as passport details/photos go through an additional layer of encryption in our databases and only decrypted on page load. This means in the extraordinarily unlikely event of a breach of our core databases this information would be illegible to attackers.

Currently sensitive data is limited to passport information but will expand with additional datatypes.

Security best practices

Systems are only as good as their weakest link. We encourage all users to implement good security hygiene. This means using strong passwords and 2-factor authentication.

Strong passwords are required for all advisors, and 2-factor authentication is required in order to access Credit Card Authorization features in Tern.

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