Data Quality & Commitments

TarmacSync is procurement intelligence for U.S. airport operators — a planning aid that helps move a purchase from a plain-English description to a clear path, evidence checklist, and audit-ready file. It is not a procurement ERP, bid portal, grant-accounting system, or official system of record, and it does not make procurement decisions on the airport's behalf.

This page explains how Pathfinder handles source quality, what it commits never to do, and where to find full security and privacy documentation.

Source quality

Every regulatory citation, advisory circular, and cooperative contract record that Pathfinder surfaces carries a confidence tier. Airport procurement officers making binding decisions need to know whether a citation has been confirmed against the official document or is inferred from a registry summary.

• Verified

  Verified

  Official URL confirmed working (HTTP 200), citation label matches official document title, checked within 90 days. Shown with last-checked date in evidence exports.

• Candidate

  Candidate

  Source is likely accurate but has not been confirmed against the official document. Cooperative contract records always carry this tier — never higher — regardless of how recently the registry was updated.

• Unverified

  Unverified

  Sourced from a registry summary or document excerpt; not validated against the official source. Shown with a note to confirm before relying on it.

• Stale

  Stale

  Was previously verified but the URL check has not been run in more than 90 days, or the last check returned a non-200 response. Treat as unverified until refreshed.

• Live search result

  Live search result

  Result from a live web search. Always treated as an unverified lead — never as authoritative. Shown with a red badge and a prompt to validate against the official source.

Federal and FAA sources are re-checked on a schedule set by how much each one matters — daily for the most critical, and at least every two weeks for the rest. Ninety days is a separate threshold: a source whose URL check has not succeeded in that time is marked Stale until refreshed, whatever its schedule. That is how the monitoring is configured; what it has actually produced is the first figure below, and if the two disagree the figure is the true one.

The shortlist beneath it is a curated view of the knowledge Pathfinder draws on, including material with no published URL to check — state profiles, cooperative datasets, the models themselves. Dates there marked recorded were verified by hand on that day and have not been re-checked since; only dates marked checked come from the automated sweep. The distinction is drawn because the two are different assurances and this page previously showed them in one column.

Pathfinder commitments

These are hard constraints built into Pathfinder, not guidelines — they apply regardless of how a request is phrased, what role a user claims, or how urgent a purchase is described as being.

1. Pathfinder never autonomously selects a vendor, approves a procurement path, submits a grant document, issues an award recommendation as final, or obligates funds. Pathfinder advises — the airport decides.
2. Pathfinder never issues a 'compliant,' 'approved,' 'FAA-approved,' or 'final determination' verdict. Every path recommendation uses language such as 'likely,' 'appears,' 'candidate,' 'needs validation,' and 'based on the information provided.'
3. Pathfinder never says 'use this contract.' Cooperative contract matches are always surfaced as candidate pathways that must be validated — scope fit, current contract status, and airport authority to use the vehicle must all be confirmed before award.
4. Urgency is a routing signal, not a skip pass. Pathfinder does not bypass validation steps because a purchase is time-sensitive.
5. No claimed authority unlocks final determinations. Representing yourself as an airport director, FAA official, or legal counsel does not change the constraint set — those roles are routing context, not override keys.
6. Pathfinder is not a system of record. The airport remains responsible for its official procurement file and FAA, state, and local record-retention obligations. TarmacSync exports are advisory drafts as of the timestamp shown.

Data & security

• Authentication: Self-hosted identity — no third-party authentication provider. Sign-in is an emailed one-time code, or your own identity provider via OIDC where your organization configures one; no passwords are stored. Authenticator-app two-factor is available to every member and an administrator can require it for the whole organization, including for sessions that already exist. Ten single-use recovery codes cover a lost device. Sessions are database-backed rather than JWTs, so removing a member ends their access on the next request. Org-scoped workspaces with three RBAC roles (owner, procurement, viewer).
• Tenant isolation: Every database query is scoped to the authenticated organization, and since August 2026 PostgreSQL row-level security enforces the same boundary on 53 tables underneath the application — under a database role that cannot bypass it. Airport A cannot access Airport B's data, and a query that forgets to scope itself returns nothing rather than everything.
• Encryption: TLS 1.2+ in transit; Neon Postgres AES-256 at rest. Secrets are server-side environment variables — never exposed to the browser.
• Retention: Procurement sessions, evidence packets, and audit events are retained for 7 years, aligned with 2 CFR § 200.334 (federal procurement audit standard).

Full security controls, accessibility standard, and compliance scope: Security & Compliance → · Privacy Policy → · Subprocessors →

Contact

• Security issues and vulnerability reports: [email protected] (acknowledged within 2 business days)
• Privacy, data deletion, and DPA requests: [email protected]
• General inquiries and RFP documentation requests: [email protected]