Privacy notice for rental applicants

Who we are

Mushind LLC ("the landlord"), managed by Ahmed Balogun, is the landlord you are applying to. Mushind LLC holds the information in your rental application and decides what happens to it. Legworthy is the website Mushind LLC uses to take rental applications. In this notice, "we" means Mushind LLC.

What we collect

When you apply, we collect:

• your name, email address and phone number;
• your current and previous addresses, with your landlords' contact details;
• your employer and monthly income;
• the people who will live with you (name, and whether each is 18 or older), your pets and your vehicles;
• your move-in date;
• your typed-name signature and the time you signed the acknowledgment and the screening authorization.

On the final step we also collect these sensitive details:

• your Social Security number or ITIN, or that you don't have one;
• your date of birth;
• your driver's license number and state;
• the documents you upload, such as pay stubs, an offer letter or bank statements.

We don't ask for a photo ID, and we don't ask about race, color, religion, sex, national origin or disability.

Why we collect it

We use your information only to process this application: to check it against the written tenant selection criteria for the home, to screen it with your authorization, to contact you about it, to match your application fee, and to meet our legal duties. We don't sell it, we don't use it for advertising, and the rental pages have no analytics.

How we protect it

• The website only works over an encrypted connection (HTTPS), and your Social Security number is never shown publicly (Texas Business & Commerce Code §501.001).
• When you submit, your sensitive details and documents are encrypted on our server at once, with a key the website itself cannot use to decrypt them. After you submit, nobody can see them through the website, including you.
• Only Ahmed Balogun can unlock them, on his own computer, when he screens your application. Each time is recorded.
• The website's logs record technical events, such as errors, but never what you type into the form.

Who sees it

• Ahmed Balogun, for Mushind LLC.
• A tenant screening provider that Mushind LLC chooses, if your application is screened. It gets only what it needs to produce a report, and only with your authorization.
• The current and previous landlords and the employer you list, when we contact them to verify what you told us.
• The companies that run the website for us, only as needed to do so: Microsoft Azure stores the website and its data in the United States; Amazon Web Services (Amazon SES) sends our emails; Cloudflare runs the check on the form that stops automated sign-ups (Turnstile), which sees technical details of your browser.
• Anyone the law requires us to give it to.

Emails we send you

We email you a link to finish your application later, a receipt when you submit, and an update when Mushind LLC decides. Emails never contain your sensitive details.

During our pilot, you may first get an email from Amazon Web Services asking you to verify your email address. Our email provider requires this before we can email you. Click the link in it to get the emails about your application.

If an email to you bounces, or you mark it as spam, Amazon SES sends Ahmed Balogun a notice with your email address and the message headers, never the message body. He deletes these notices within 30 days.

How long we keep it

• Sensitive details and documents: deleted 30 days after Mushind LLC decides on your application, or 90 days after you submit if there is no decision. Changing a decision doesn't extend this. Our backups can still hold them for about 7 more days, until those backups expire.
• If we ever restore from a backup: in a serious failure we may have to restore our systems from a backup. If a decision made shortly before the failure can't be recovered, the deletion date is worked out again from the records that remain, usually 90 days after you submit, as for an application with no decision. Your sensitive details may then be kept longer, or deleted sooner, than the date above.
• Other application details (everything else above, and the decision): kept 2 years after the decision, or 2 years after you submit if there is no decision, then deleted. Two years covers the period in which a fair-housing complaint can be made.
• An application you never submit: deleted when its resume link expires, 7 days after it was sent. Documents uploaded to it are deleted then, and in any case within 120 days.
• Notices about bounced or spam-marked emails: deleted within 30 days, as described above.
• Route activity logs: Legworthy's separate showing-route tool keeps its activity logs for 12 months. They hold no rental application information.

If you withdraw your application, Mushind LLC records that as its decision, and the 30-day deletion of your sensitive details starts then.

If something goes wrong

If your sensitive details are taken by someone who shouldn't have them, we will tell you without unreasonable delay, and no later than 60 days after we determine that it happened (Texas Business & Commerce Code §521.053).

Questions

To ask what we hold about you, to correct it, to withdraw your application, or with any other question, email hello@legworthy.com.