Lantern
Privacy Policy
Effective [SET ON PUBLISH]
Lantern is a private client portal for real estate transactions, operated by Robardsoft LLC ("Lantern," "we," "us").
You are most likely reading this because your real estate agent invited you to a Lantern portal for your transaction. Your agent's business and Lantern are separate: your agent decides what to put in your portal, and we run the software it lives in. This policy covers what we do with your information. Your agent's own brokerage handles its own records under its own obligations, which this policy does not govern.
1. What we collect
What you give us when you sign in. Your name, your email address, and a password — or, if you choose, a Google or Microsoft sign-in instead of a password. If you give us a mobile number for notifications, that too. We do not ask for a number in order to create your account.
What goes into your portal. Documents you or your agent upload, messages between you and your agent, and the property and transaction details your portal is organized around.
A record of access. Every time a document is opened, we record who opened it and when. This is deliberate and it is described further in §3 — it is how we can tell you truthfully who has seen your documents.
Ordinary technical information. Your browser sends an IP address and a browser identifier with every request, as it does to every website; we keep server logs containing them for a limited period for security and troubleshooting.
What we do not collect. We do not ask for your Social Security number, bank account or card numbers, or credit information. If a document you upload happens to contain something like that, it is stored the same way as any other document — but we never ask you for it, and nothing in Lantern is built to read it.
2. How we use it
We use your information to run your portal and for nothing else. Specifically: to sign you in, to show you your documents and messages, to notify you when something happens in your portal, to keep the access record described above, and to protect the service against abuse.
We do not use your information for advertising. We do not profile you. We do not sell it — see §6.
3. What we promise about confidentiality
This section says exactly what is true, and deliberately stops short of things that sound better but are not.
- Your information is encrypted in transit and at rest.
- Only the people on your transaction can open your documents. This is enforced in the database itself, not only in the application — so a bug in the app produces an empty result rather than someone else's documents.
- Every access is recorded in a log that cannot be edited or deleted, by anyone. Not by your agent, not by us. The system that writes the log has no permission to change it.
- The person who runs the service has infrastructure access, as with any hosted product, and does not use it to read client content. We think you should be told this plainly rather than promised something no hosted service can honestly promise. Access to the underlying systems is limited to what running them requires, kept separate from the credentials the application itself uses, and the access record above applies to it.
If you want the short version: your documents are visible to the people on your transaction, and every time anyone opens one, that is permanently on the record.
4. Who can see your portal
The people on your transaction: you, anyone else party to it — a spouse or co-buyer, for example — and your agent.
Someone outside that set can be given access only through an explicit, recorded grant: read-only, limited to what it names, revocable, and often time-limited. A lender needing one document is the ordinary example. Grants are visible to you and are written to the same access record as everything else.
Your agent's brokerage does not get blanket access to your portal by virtue of being the brokerage.
5. Text messages and mobile information
If you give us a mobile number and opt in, we may send you text messages about activity in your portal — for example, that your agent has sent you a message or uploaded a document. These are service messages about your own transaction. We do not send marketing texts.
You can stop them at any time by replying STOP. Reply HELP for help. Message and data rates may apply. Message frequency varies with activity in your portal.
No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Information sharing with subcontractors who provide support services, such as the messaging provider that delivers the message to your carrier, is permitted solely for that purpose. All other use case categories exclude text messaging originator opt-in data and consent; this information will not be shared with any third parties.
We keep a record of when and how you gave consent, and of when you withdrew it.
6. Who we share information with
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We have never done so and the product has no mechanism for it.
We use a small number of service providers to run Lantern. They handle your information only to provide their service to us:
| Provider | What it does | Where |
|---|---|---|
| DigitalOcean | Hosting, database, and document storage | United States (New York) |
| Postmark | Sends email — invitations, password resets, notifications | United States |
| Google / Microsoft | Optional sign-in, if you choose it instead of a password | United States |
| Messaging provider | Would deliver text messages, if you opt in. None is selected today, and Lantern sends no text messages; one will be named here before any are sent. | — |
Beyond those, we disclose information only when the law requires it — a subpoena, court order, or equivalent legal process — or when it is necessary to investigate abuse of the service or protect someone's safety. If we are legally compelled to produce your information, we will tell you unless we are prohibited from doing so.
Your agent's brokerage keeps its own transaction records in its own systems. Those records are not governed by this policy.
7. How long we keep things, and deletion
Lantern does not delete. When something is removed from view — an archived document, a closed transaction — it is marked archived and retained, not destroyed. This is a deliberate design decision: a portal that could quietly lose a document would be worse than useless in a transaction.
Two consequences worth being direct about:
- Access and retention are different things. After your transaction closes, continued access to your portal depends on an active subscription. If it lapses, your access is suspended and your data is retained in full — resubscribing restores everything exactly as it was. Nothing is deleted because you stopped paying.
- A deletion request may not remove everything. You can ask us to delete your account and content (§8), and we will honor it as far as we are able. Some records may need to be retained — the access log, for instance, exists precisely because it cannot be altered, and your agent's brokerage has its own record-keeping obligations under Georgia law that operate independently of us.
8. Your choices
- See your information. Everything we hold about your transaction is visible in your portal.
- Correct it. Your name, email, and notification preferences are editable in your account. Ask your agent to correct anything about the transaction itself.
- Get a copy. Ask us and we will provide your documents and messages in a usable format.
- Turn off notifications. In your account settings; text messages also stop on STOP.
- Delete your account. Ask us — see §7 for what deletion can and cannot reach.
- Sign-in method. If you use Google or Microsoft sign-in, you can set a password instead at any time. We receive only your name and email address from them, never access to your accounts there.
To exercise any of these, email privacy@lanternportal.com.
9. Security
Encryption in transit and at rest, access enforced at the database rather than only in the application, an append-only access log, and separated credentials for the application and for administration. §3 states plainly what those protections do and do not cover.
No system is perfect. If we discover a breach affecting your information, we will notify you and your agent promptly and tell you what we know.
10. Children
Lantern is for parties to a real estate transaction and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has given us information, email us and we will remove it.
11. Changes
If we change this policy in a way that affects how we handle your information, we will tell you — by email or in the portal — before it takes effect, not after. Older versions are available on request.
12. Contact
Email privacy@lanternportal.com, or write to us at the address on file for Robardsoft LLC:
Robardsoft LLC13001 Cambridge Pl NE
Albuquerque, NM 87112
United States
Robardsoft LLC is a Georgia limited liability company, operated from Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States. Lantern currently serves Georgia real estate transactions.