Security and data

How Pencil sources its records, cites them, and controls who sees them

Where the data comes from

Pencil is built on the public record: county property rolls, recorded deeds and mortgages, court and lien filings, state company registries, zoning codes and federal flood, environmental and census layers. Some records, such as owner contact details, come from licensed providers under written agreements.

Every figure is cited

• A loan figure links to its recorded mortgage, with the book and page.
• An owner link links to the registry filing behind it.
• A zoning figure links to the code section and the date it was read.
• Projections, such as a refinance gap, show the inputs behind them.
• Missing data is shown as missing. When a registry is ambiguous, Pencil shows the document trail instead of guessing a person.

Access control

• Accounts are created for each firm by our team; there is no public sign-up.
• Sign-in runs on a dedicated authentication service, so passwords never reach our servers. Google and Microsoft sign-in are available.
• Sessions use HttpOnly, Secure cookies that page scripts cannot read.
• Access inside a workspace is role-based, and service keys stay on our servers.
• Access to sensitive records is written to an append-only audit log.
• Pencil is served over HTTPS.

AI and your data

When you ask Pencil's AI a question, the question and the records needed to answer it are sent to a model provider to write the answer. Pencil can be limited to providers that have agreed by contract not to retain the data. Answers carry their sources like every other figure.

Owner contact details

Where Pencil shows a phone number or email for an owner, it shows its do-not-call and litigator flags beside it. Members are responsible for following telemarketing and other contact laws.

What Pencil is not

Pencil is not a consumer reporting agency, and its data may not be used for credit, employment, insurance or tenant-screening decisions. See the Privacy Policy for how we handle personal information.

Report a security issue

Write to hello@pencil.broker with the details. We will acknowledge it and tell you what we did about it.