Dealership Safeguards

This page is written for dealership managers and compliance officers evaluating a sales associate’s use of Dealer Duo. It states plainly what Dealer Duo touches, what it never touches, and what controls protect the data that passes through it. Print it and place it in your policy or vendor file.

Dealer Duo gives a sales associate a personal link-in-bio showroom: a public page with their name, photo, contact information, your dealership’s publicly listed inventory, and a path for buyers to reach out. It is a marketing front door for the audience the sales associate already has. It is designed to complement the dealership’s website, not replace it.

Dealer Duo does not connect to your DMS, CRM, or lender portals. It does not receive deal jackets, credit applications, finance terms, buyers orders, driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers, or any records from dealership systems. There is nothing for a sales associate to upload from your store.

Three categories, all narrow. First, vehicle inventory taken from your dealership’s own public website listings, the same information any shopper can see. Second, the sales associate’s own profile information: name, photo, contact details, and social links. Third, pre-sale buyer inquiries submitted through the page: typically a name, phone number or email address, the vehicle of interest, and a message.

Lead forms never ask for Social Security numbers, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, income, or credit information. A Dealer Duo lead is the digital equivalent of a buyer handing a sales associate their phone number on the lot.

Inventory is sourced from the dealership’s public listings and refreshed on a recurring schedule. Pages display the dealership’s own advertised information; sales associates do not set or edit vehicle prices in Dealer Duo. Vehicles that leave your public listings are removed on the next sync, and a dealership may ask us to stop displaying its inventory entirely.

Buyer inquiries are protected by anti-spam verification at submission, encrypted in transit and at rest, and delivered only to the sales associate whose page received them. Application access is tenant-scoped: a sales associate sees only their own page and their own leads. Administrative access is limited and logged.

Dealer Duo uses the following providers to deliver the platform, each bound by its own published security and data-governance terms. Inventory sync and search run on infrastructure we operate ourselves and process only public listing data. We assess this list periodically and update this page when it materially changes.

• ConvexUnited States

  Application database, authentication, and audit records.

  https://www.convex.dev/security

• CloudflareUnited States · Global edge

  Page hosting and delivery (Workers), image storage and delivery (Images), video hosting and automatic captions (Stream), and anti-spam verification on lead forms (Turnstile).

  https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/reference/security-model/

• AnthropicUnited States

  Language-model drafting of page copy and layouts from sales associate-provided business information, setup suggestions drawn from the dealership's public website and the sales associate's public social profiles, and a second reading of social posts when the first reading (see OpenRouter) fails or cannot be verified. When a sales associate asks the desk for a payment quote, it is also the second reader, after OpenRouter, of that customer's last 30 days of messages, to fill in the request. Before any message is sent, links, social handles, email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, ZIP and postal codes, Social Security numbers, driver's license and other ID numbers, card numbers, VINs and dates of birth are removed; a customer's name may remain. Inputs are not used to train public models.

  https://trust.anthropic.com

• OpenRouterUnited States · Model hosts vary

  Routes language-model requests to companies that run the model (GLM 5.3 Flash). Used to read a sales associate's social posts, meaning the written captions and the spoken words in attached videos, for advertising-compliance checks and to match a post to a vehicle in inventory, and to classify the public text of a dealership website entered during setup. Social post requests go first to Friendli, Parasail, Decart, or Together. If those are unavailable, and for website checks, OpenRouter may pick another host for the model. When a sales associate asks the desk for a payment quote, it also reads that customer's last 30 days of messages to fill in the request; those requests go only to hosts that keep no data. Before any message is sent, links, social handles, email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, ZIP and postal codes, Social Security numbers, driver's license and other ID numbers, card numbers, VINs and dates of birth are removed; a customer's name may remain.

  https://trust.openrouter.ai

• FirecrawlUnited States

  Retrieves public web pages for us: the dealership website, the sales associate's own site, and their public social profiles during setup and the dealership website check, and a custom domain when confirming it forwards to the sales associate's page. It receives web addresses only.

  https://trust.firecrawl.dev

• ResendUnited States

  Email delivery for account and lead notifications and for email between a sales associate and buyers, including receiving buyer replies and leads forwarded by email.

  https://resend.com/legal/security

• TwilioUnited States

  Text messaging between a sales associate and buyers, each sales associate's texting number, and one-time codes that verify a sales associate's phone number. Twilio receives the phone numbers and message content needed to deliver each text.

  https://www.twilio.com/en-us/trust-center

• GoogleUnited States · Global

  Optional Gmail sending. When a sales associate connects a Google account, email they send to buyers from Dealer Duo goes out through Gmail, so Google receives the recipient, subject, and message. Dealer Duo can send from the account but cannot read its inbox.

  https://workspace.google.com/security/

• StripeUnited States

  Payment processing for Dealer Duo subscriptions and add-ons. Card details are entered in Stripe's secure form and go directly to Stripe; Dealer Duo never sees or stores full card numbers. No buyer data is sent.

  https://docs.stripe.com/security

A Dealer Duo page identifies the sales associate, not the store, and must not claim dealership sponsorship or endorsement unless that is true. If a page misstates an affiliation, uses your dealership’s name or information without permission, or if you simply want your inventory removed, contact us and we will act promptly, including unpublishing the page while a dispute is resolved.

The FTC Safeguards Rule (16 CFR Part 314) covers customer information that arises from financial products and services. Dealer Duo is designed to minimize sensitive data collection and to sit upstream of that: it is built not to receive nonpublic personal information from dealership systems, and the buyer information it handles is pre-sale marketing contact data volunteered by the shopper.

If your written information security program nonetheless treats Dealer Duo as a service provider requiring oversight under 16 CFR § 314.4(f), this page is written to support your vendor review, so your Qualified Individual can document what Dealer Duo receives and the controls that protect it.

Dealer Duo commits to notify the affected sales associate, and the affected dealership’s designated contact where a dealership relationship exists, within three business days of confirming unauthorized access, acquisition, or use of their data, and sooner where the matter is material. Notification includes the categories of information involved, the date or date range of the incident, the date of discovery, and the actions taken in response.

Dealer Duo does not claim to be “FTC compliant,” “Safeguards Rule compliant,” or “GLBA certified,” and it does not guarantee your dealership’s compliance. No vendor can. Compliance obligations rest with the dealership, and no software product satisfies them on its own.

What Dealer Duo does claim is narrower and accurate: it is compliance-minded and dealer-friendly software, built with dealership data-security expectations in mind, designed to minimize sensitive data collection, and written up on this page to support, not replace, your own vendor review.

Dennis Walsh is responsible for the security and data-handling practices described on this page. He owned a car dealership for 23 years, is an attorney licensed in Arizona whose practice focuses on dealership compliance, and is an electrical engineer and software developer. He built Dealer Duo, and drew these boundaries, knowing exactly what a dealership compliance file needs to say about a vendor.