Our take on privacy: why a money app should know as little about you as possible

A bank statement is a diary you never meant to write. It knows where you live, what you eat at 1 a.m., who you send money to, how often you take a cab home and which subscriptions you forgot about. It is one of the most personal documents you own, and most people have never read theirs closely.

We built Where Did My Money Go? to help you read it, and to be honest about where your money goes. But we also decided early that a tool which asks you to share something this personal has to earn that trust in the way it is built, not just in what it says. This post explains how we think about that.

The usual way: more doors, more risk

Most money apps start with a list of requests before they show you anything useful:

• Create an account and a password.
• Connect your bank so the app can read your accounts from now on.
• Allow notifications, contacts, location and more.

Each request makes sense on its own. Together they create a long-lived copy of your financial life on someone else’s servers, with a password guarding it and a standing connection to your bank. Every one of those is a door, and every door is something that can be left open.

Why this matters now

Data breaches have stopped being rare. Large, well-funded companies are hacked, and the information they held can turn up for sale months or years later. Passwords get reused, connections get forgotten, old databases get copied.

Financial details are especially valuable to the people who steal them. They make scams believable: a message that mentions your bank, a recent purchase or a person you really paid is far more convincing than a generic one. You cannot control how every company protects your data. You can choose to give fewer companies the chance to lose it.

The safest data is data that was never collected. The next safest is data that was deleted quickly. That one idea shapes almost every decision we make.

What we chose not to build

• No sign-up and no login. There is no account, so there is no password to steal and no profile of you that grows over time.
• No bank or app syncing. We never ask for your bank login or a permanent connection. You pick one statement, share it once, and that is the end of it.
• No permissions. We do not ask for your contacts, location, camera, microphone or notifications.
• No ads, no tracking of our own, no selling. We earn from an optional one-time payment for the full report. Your data is not the product.

What we do instead

• Clean it on your device where we can. In most browsers your statement is opened and cleaned on your own phone or computer. Account and card numbers, bank codes, phone numbers, email addresses and your own name where the statement prints it are removed before anything is sent. You can read the cleaned text before you continue.
• Keep as little as possible, for as short as possible. Your file is never saved. The report made from it is deleted after 48 hours. We do not keep a history of your spending.
• Use AI carefully. AI reads your statement lines and writes the commentary. It cannot browse, it never sees anyone else’s report, and it never does the maths. Every total and score comes from our own code, so a confident-sounding mistake cannot change your numbers.
• Lock the doors that do exist. Every connection is encrypted, requests from other websites are refused, repeated attempts are limited, and every payment is checked directly with the payment provider. Card details go to Razorpay, PayPal or Stripe, never to us.
• Make the link the key. Each report opens with a long, random link that cannot be guessed. Anyone you share it with can see it until it is deleted, so treat it like a private document.

What we can and cannot promise

No website can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend to. What we can promise is a direction: we design every feature to need less of your information, not more, and we tell you plainly what we do with what you share. When we get something wrong, we fix it and say so.

You also stay in control of what you share in the first place. If you want, you can remove personal details from your statement yourself before uploading. Our guide Is it safe to upload your bank statement? shows how, and gives a checklist you can use on any app, including ours.

Why we care

Our mission is simple: help people see clearly where their money goes, honestly and with a bit of humour, without asking them to pay for it with their privacy. Better money habits start with a clear picture. A clear picture should not cost you your data.

The exact rules, including what we keep, for how long, who processes it and your rights, are in our Privacy Policy. If this post and the policy ever seem to differ, the policy is the one that applies.