API Usage
Security & Data Protection
Security measures and data protection policies for the Proff Connect API.
Proff Connect is built with a "Privacy by Design" approach. The following principles ensure that your data remains secure and that the integration is compliant with strict privacy regulations.
1. Authentication (BYOT - Bring Your Own Token)
- Each customer supplies their own API token from Proff.
- Tokens are stored using Salesforce Protected Custom Settings, making them invisible to users and admins.
- Tokens are masked during validation and cannot be exported from the system.
2. Data Privacy & No Exfiltration
- Proff Connect only sends minimal lookup values to the Proff API, such as organization numbers, search terms, and country filters.
- No Salesforce record data, personal information (PII), or internal metadata is ever transmitted externally.
3. Read-Only & User-Driven Architecture
- All external communication is GET-only. The application never writes, modifies, or "pushes" data to external services.
- Standard actions (Search, Sync, Enrich) are always initiated by an explicit user interaction (e.g., clicking Search or Refresh). Two optional advanced features — Mass Update (batch synchronisation across many accounts) and Real-Time Changes (event-driven monitoring) — may run background batch jobs or scheduled processes when explicitly enabled and configured by an administrator.
4. Secure Communication
- All communication with Proff's API uses encrypted HTTPS (TLS 1.2 or higher).
- Unique Correlation IDs are used for all requests to ensure secure diagnostics without exposing data.
5. Logging & Transparency
- Technical logs (endpoint names, status codes, and duration) are stored 100% within your Salesforce org.
- The application never logs API tokens, authorization headers, or response bodies for successful calls.
- Customers maintain full control over their own log retention policies.
6. GDPR & Compliance
- The solution retrieves only publicly available business information.
- Users choose exactly which data points to store in their Salesforce objects (Account, Lead, Contact).
- No external system or third party has access to your Salesforce data, ensuring full compliance with GDPR and internal security frameworks (CRUD/FLS/Sharing).
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