Money Habits — Privacy Policy

Money Habits ("we", "our", "the app") is a personal-finance planning application that helps individuals and families plan their budget, investments, and journey to financial independence and early retirement (FIRE). This policy explains what data the app collects, how it is used and stored, and your choices. Money Habits is a planning tool only — it is not a bank, lender, or investment adviser.

1. Information we collect

2. Where your data is stored

Type	Examples	Why
Account identity	Your name, email address, and profile photo, obtained through Google Sign-In	To sign you in and identify family members
Financial information you enter	Budget, income, expenses, savings, investment holdings, insurance details, and (optionally) your PAN used to parse investment statements	To provide budgeting and FIRE planning features
Family information	The email addresses of family members you invite to share a plan	To enable family mode
Diagnostics	Crash reports and anonymous in-app usage events	To fix crashes and improve the app

Your financial plan is stored in your own Google account. Money Habits creates a Google Sheet (and related backup files) inside your Google Drive to hold your budget, investments, and projections, so your data syncs across your devices and survives reinstalling the app. You own these files and can view or delete them at any time from Google Drive.

On your device, the app keeps a local copy of your data in a database that is encrypted at rest (AES-256 / SQLCipher). Where a PAN is stored in your sheet, it is stored as encrypted ciphertext, not plain text.

We operate a small backend on Google Firebase. It stores only: pointers to your sheet, a registry of app users (Google user ID, email, and display name) used to power family invitations, family/membership records, and — if you turn it on — the community benchmarking contributions described below. Your individual transactions are not stored on our backend; they live in your Google Sheet.

Community benchmarking (optional, off by default)

Money Habits can show you how your household compares with others like it. That only works if households contribute, so the app can send a monthly summary — but only if you switch it on. It is off unless you do, and you can switch it off again at any time in Settings → Privacy & Data Sharing.

Each contribution is filed under a random identifier generated on your device. It is not your name, your email, or your Google account ID, and we hold nothing that maps it back to you. Contributions carry no individual transactions, no account or card numbers, no PAN and no names.

This data is used to produce the aggregate benchmarks shown in the app. It is never sold, and it is never shared with third parties for advertising.

Where these figures come from. A contribution is assembled on your device from the records you entered into the app, which the app keeps in its own local database. It is not read back out of your Google Sheet or any other Google API. Even so, we hold aggregated and anonymised data to the same Limited Use standard we apply to Google user data, described in section 4: it is used only to provide the benchmark feature you switched on, and never for advertising, never for lending or credit decisions, never for sale or transfer to a data broker, and never to train AI or machine-learning models.

3. How we use your data

4. Google user data — Limited Use

Money Habits's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Specifically:

We access your Google Drive using the drive.file scope, which limits the app to files it creates or that you explicitly open — the app cannot see your other Drive files.
We access Google Sheets using the spreadsheets scope. Google does not offer a narrower, per-file scope for Sheets the way Drive offers drive.file, so this permission is technically capable of reaching any spreadsheet in your Google account — the "See, edit, create, and delete all your Google Sheets spreadsheets" wording you may see on Google's own consent screen reflects that. In practice, our app's code only ever reads and writes your Money Habits plan and shared family sheets; it never lists, opens, or modifies any other spreadsheet in your account.
We do not transfer or sell Google user data to third parties, use it for advertising, or allow humans to read it, except as needed for security, to comply with law, or with your explicit consent.

5. AI and machine learning

Money Habits uses one machine-learning feature: on-device text recognition (Google ML Kit) that reads a receipt you photograph, so its lines can be turned into transactions without typing. It runs entirely on your device.

That model reads only images you capture or choose for this purpose. It does not read your Google Sheets, Drive files, Gmail or Google Photos, and Money Habits requests no scope that would let it.
We do not use raw or aggregated/anonymised Google Workspace or Photos API user data to develop, improve or train AI or machine-learning models.
We do not transfer raw or aggregated/anonymised Google Workspace or Photos API user data to any third-party service that uses that data to train its AI or machine-learning models. Money Habits sends no user data to any external AI service.
The receipt model is a stock, pre-trained Google ML Kit component. It is not retrained, fine-tuned or personalised on your data, and nothing it reads is sent anywhere for training.

The use of raw or derived user data received from Google Workspace APIs will adhere to the Google User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

6. Data sharing

We do not sell your data and do not share it with third parties for advertising. Data is processed by our service providers (Google Cloud / Firebase) solely to run the app. When you use family mode, the data in a shared family plan is visible to the family members you invite.

7. Data retention and deletion

8. Security

Data in transit is protected with TLS/HTTPS. The local database is encrypted at rest, and sensitive fields such as PAN are stored as ciphertext. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we take reasonable measures to protect your information.

9. Children

Money Habits is intended for adults (18+) and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by updating the "Last updated" date at the top of this page.