PageFreezer Aids Website, Social Media Data Retention

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An area of electronic data management that many companies fail to consider is the need to maintain records of their webpage presence. In this day and age of increased government enforcement of mortgage company marketing practices, as well as the risk of civil litigation, having an accurate portrayal of what was on your website at any given time can be difference between winning and losing a legal case.

That is where PageFreezer comes in. It takes a snapshot of what is on the website and stores it in its original format at one of its data centers. Everything can be seen in the future as it actually appeared, including video and audio elements.
For public companies, the record retention meets the requirements of regulatory bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and FINRA as well as compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, explained PageFreezer’s Vince Lebow.

The platform also helps to comply with the legal requirements of data authenticity and data integrity. It helps to show the records have not been altered so it complies with evidentiary rules. Lebow said PageFreezer helps to meet that need because every element that goes into the archives is “digitally signed according to the e-Sign Act,” he said. This means everything which enters the database has a digital hash mark and a digital time stamp. That time stamp is synchronized with the atomic clock. The signature is 512-bit encryption.

So if something is altered after the fact, those markers will show there had been changes.
This technology allows the PageFreezer archives to be used for social media record retention as well. It currently archives Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but not YouTube.

But it is not just legal compliance reasons some companies use PageFreezer’s services. There are businesses that capture promotions and marketing campaigns and store those for future use, he pointed out. Some are capturing their competitors’ sites to use to gain market intelligence.
Another use is to have the original page a customer might have viewed handy to help resolve customer service complaints.

Some want to keep records for search engine optimization and analytics purposes, especially at larger companies where multiple administrators could be changing different pages many times. When someone sees a big spike in traffic at the website, it allows the person in charge to see where, when and why, Lebow said.

Archiving is able to be performed on a real-time basis, to capture multiple intraday changes.
After the initial archiving, the company then only archives when changes have been made, to avoid redundancies.

PageFreezer comes in two versions. There is the PageFreezer On Demand Edition, which is an online service with no software to be installed or configured.

Then there is PageFreezer On Premises Edition, which is kept at the company. With this version, users can archive their intranet pages and other internal websites.

“We made the interface as simple as possible because we didn’t want this to be a product just for IT departments. We want to be able to have an enterprise-wide accessible archive so anybody in the organization can log in and check out past iterations of the website,” Lebow said.

He added that in the mortgage business that would include the legal team, internal and external compliance and quality control and even state regulatory examiners. Examiners want the file to be in the native format and exactly as it was at the time it went public, and that is what PageFreezer gives companies.