Privacy Policy

The short version

• We collect what we need to run Budgetsplit: your email address, your name, and what you and your groups enter. • Your private space is visible only to you. What you add to a group is visible to every member of that group. • Your data is stored in the European Union, in Frankfurt, Germany. • We do not sell your data, we show no advertising, and we use no analytics or tracking. • You can download all of your data and delete your account yourself, in Settings, at any time.

The rest of this page explains each point in detail.

Who we are

[your full legal name], trading as First Byte Labs, [postal address where you can be served], decides why and how your personal data is used in Budgetsplit (the "controller" under the EU General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR).

This policy covers the Budgetsplit website at budgetsplit.app and the Budgetsplit apps for phones. It does not cover other websites or services that we link to or that you use alongside Budgetsplit, such as Google or an app store.

Contact for anything about your data: firstbytelabs@gmail.com. We have not appointed a data protection officer, because the law does not require one for a service of our size. Privacy questions go to the address above and are read by the person who runs Budgetsplit.

What we collect: your account

• Your email address, and the name you choose to show to other people. • How you sign in: password, or Google. If you use a password, our sign-in provider keeps only a one-way scrambled version of it. We never see it and cannot read it back. If you use Google, Google tells us your email address and name, and nothing else. We do not get access to your Google account, contacts, files or calendar. • When your account was created, and when you last signed in. • The versions of the terms and privacy policy you accepted, your confirmation that you are 18 or older, and when you gave them. We record a yes and a date, never a date of birth. • Whether you have finished the first-run setup.

What we collect: what you enter

• Transactions: amount, currency, date, category, note, who paid, and who shares an expense and by how much. • Payments between members, recorded to settle up. • Budgets, and the names of your groups and custom categories. • Which groups you belong to, and your role in each (owner or member). • Invite codes you create for your groups.

Whatever you type into a note or a name is stored exactly as you typed it. Please do not enter anything you would not want the members of that group to read, and never enter bank card numbers, passwords or health information.

What we collect: security and technical records

• Short records of actions in a group (for example "member removed", "invite code created"), with the date and who did it, but no amounts and no notes. We keep them to investigate abuse and mistakes. • Attempts to join a group with an invite code, so that guessing codes can be slowed down and stopped. • Technical details that our hosting and sign-in providers record whenever you use the service: your IP address, the type of browser or device, the pages or functions requested, and the time. These are needed to deliver the service, find faults and defend against attacks. • Emails we send you (for example to confirm your address) and the fact that they were sent. If you write to us, we keep your message and our reply.

What we do not collect

We do not collect your location, contacts, photos, camera or microphone data, or advertising identifiers. We have no analytics, no advertising tools and no third-party trackers in the website or the apps. We do not track you across other websites or apps.

If you use the phone app's fingerprint or face lock, your phone handles that. Budgetsplit never receives your fingerprint or face data, only the phone's answer of yes or no.

Where your data comes from

Almost all of it comes from you: what you type, and the choices you make in the app. Some comes from other people: the members of a group can add entries that involve you (for example an expense that you share, or a payment to you), and a group owner can remove you from the group. If you sign in with Google, your email address and name come from Google. Technical records are created automatically when you use the service.

Why we use it, and our legal basis

We use your data only to run Budgetsplit for you and to keep it safe. Under the GDPR we need a legal basis for each use:

• To create your account, sign you in, show your groups and work out who owes whom. This is needed to provide the service you asked for (Article 6(1)(b), performance of a contract). • To protect the service and its users: limiting repeated attempts, keeping action records, finding and fixing faults, defending against attacks and abuse. This is our legitimate interest in running a secure service (Article 6(1)(f)). You can object to it; see "Your rights". • To keep a record that you accepted the terms and confirmed your age, to answer legal claims, and to meet our legal duties (Article 6(1)(c) and (f)). • To answer you when you write to us and to send the emails that the service needs, such as confirming your address or a password reset (Article 6(1)(b) and (f)).

We do not sell your data. We do not use it for advertising, and we do not build profiles of you. We do not make decisions about you by automatic means that have legal or similarly significant effect. We do not use what you enter to train artificial intelligence models.

Other people's data in your groups

A group is shared. Your name, and everything you add to a group, is visible to every member of that group for as long as it stays there. The owner of a group can also see who its members are and can remove members.

When you enter information about other people, for example a friend's name in a note, you are responsible for having the right to do so. Do not enter more about anyone than you need to.

Group members are not part of Budgetsplit and are responsible for what they do with information they see in a group. We cannot control what a member does with it, for example if they copy it or take a screenshot.

Who sees it

• You. • The members of any group you belong to, for what is entered in that group, including your name. • The people who run Budgetsplit, only when needed to operate, secure and support the service. We do not read your entries as a matter of routine. • The service providers listed below, who handle data on our behalf and only to run Budgetsplit. They are bound by data processing agreements and may not use your data for their own purposes. • Courts, authorities and others, where the law requires us to share data, or where it is needed to establish, exercise or defend legal claims. • A buyer or successor, if Budgetsplit is ever transferred to another operator. We would tell you first, and this policy would keep applying unless you agreed to a change.

The app stores (Google Play, and later the Apple App Store) tell us about downloads under their own policies. Budgetsplit does not receive your store account details.

Our service providers

• Supabase: our database, sign-in and email-sending service for authentication. It stores your account and everything you enter. Region: European Union (Frankfurt, Germany). • Vercel: hosts the website and delivers its pages. It processes technical details such as your IP address when you visit. The website runs in Frankfurt, Germany, but a request may pass through Vercel's wider network on the way. • Our email provider: sends the confirmation and password-reset emails, so it processes your email address and the message. We use a provider located in the European Union. • Google: if you choose Google sign-in, Google identifies you and passes your email address and name to us. Google acts under its own privacy policy, and it may learn that you use Budgetsplit. Choosing Google is optional; you can sign in with a password instead. • Google Play (and later the Apple App Store): where you download the phone app.

If we add a provider that handles your personal data, we will name it here before it starts.

Where it is kept, and transfers abroad

Your data is stored in the European Union, in Frankfurt, Germany, in our Supabase database.

Some of our providers are companies based outside the European Union, for example in the United States, and their staff or systems may be able to reach data. Where that happens we rely on safeguards the law recognises, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or the provider's certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply at firstbytelabs@gmail.com.

If you use Budgetsplit from outside the European Union, your data is still handled in the European Union under this policy.

How we protect it

Your data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS) and encrypted at rest in our EU database. Every request is checked by the database itself, so only the members of a group can read what is in it. The database allows no direct access to group or money tables, and each function checks who is asking and validates every value. People who are not signed in get nothing.

Amounts are hidden until you choose to show them. The website signs you out after a period of inactivity. The phone app locks the moment you leave it, and screenshots are blocked in release builds. The website uses a strict Content-Security-Policy.

Budgetsplit does not currently use end-to-end encryption, which means our systems can read the information you enter in order to run the service.

No system is perfectly secure. If a security breach puts your rights at risk, we will tell the data protection authority and you as the law requires, as soon as we can. If you find a weakness, please tell us at firstbytelabs@gmail.com.

Cookies and similar storage

Budgetsplit uses only what it needs to work. Because of that there is no cookie banner to accept.

• Sign-in cookies (website): keep you signed in. They are set only when you sign in, they are not used for tracking, and they are removed when you sign out. • Device storage (website): your theme and whether amounts start hidden are saved in your browser's local storage under the name "budgetsplit.prefs". Nothing sensitive is stored there. • Secure storage (phone app): your sign-in session is kept in the phone's secure storage (Keychain on iOS, Keystore on Android), and your preferences on the device.

We use no advertising cookies, no analytics and no trackers. You can clear this storage at any time in your browser or phone settings; you will then have to sign in again.

How long we keep it

We keep your data until you delete your account. When you do:

• your account, name, email, consent records and private space are deleted; • entries you added to a group you shared with other people stay in that group, so the group's totals stay correct. They are shown as "Former member", and nothing links them back to you; • if you were the only owner of a shared group, ownership passes to the longest-standing member; if nobody else is in the group, the group is deleted; • the link between you and the short action records is removed straight away, and those records are deleted after 180 days; • invite-attempt records are deleted after one day; • our providers keep backups and logs on a rolling schedule, so a copy can remain in a backup for up to 7 days after deletion, and is then overwritten.

If you leave a group without deleting your account, what you added stays in that group, attributed to you. Ask the group owner or write to us if you want it removed. Messages you send us are kept for as long as needed to deal with your request, and for up to three years after it is settled where the law lets us keep them to defend legal claims. Records that the law obliges us to keep are kept for as long as the law requires.

Your rights

You have the right to:

• see the personal data we hold about you, and get a copy (Article 15). Settings, Download my data gives you one straight away; • have wrong data corrected (Article 16). You can change your name in Settings; • have your data erased (Article 17). Settings, Delete account does this; • restrict or object to how we use your data: ask us to pause using it while a problem is looked into (Article 18), or object to uses based on our legitimate interests (Article 21). If you object, we stop unless we can show a compelling reason that outweighs your interests, or we need the data for legal claims; • receive your data in a form you can move to another service (Article 20). The download is a structured file, and a group's transactions can also be exported as CSV; • withdraw any consent you gave, at any time, without affecting what happened before.

To use a right, use the buttons in Settings or write to firstbytelabs@gmail.com. We may need to check it is really you. We will reply within one month, and tell you if we need longer for a complicated request. It is free of charge unless a request is clearly unfounded or excessive.

You can complain to a data protection authority: the one where you live or work, the one where an alleged breach happened, or the one responsible for us in Germany. You are welcome to contact us first, and we will try to put things right.

Do you have to give us this data?

Your email address and name are needed to create an account. Without them we cannot offer Budgetsplit. Everything else you enter is your choice; a group only shows what you and its members decide to put in it. Confirming your age and accepting the terms are needed to use the service. Google sign-in is optional.

If you are in India

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act you can ask to see, correct, complete and erase your personal data, to have complaints dealt with, and to nominate someone to act for you. Our contact for any of these, and for grievances, is firstbytelabs@gmail.com. We will answer within the time the law sets. If we do not resolve your complaint, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

Children

Budgetsplit is for people who are 18 or older. We ask everyone to confirm their age when they sign up, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we will delete it. If you think that has happened, write to firstbytelabs@gmail.com.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and where the law requires it we will ask you to accept it again. Smaller corrections, such as fixing a typing mistake, may be made without notice. The date at the top shows when it was last updated.

Contact

[your full legal name], trading as First Byte Labs [postal address where you can be served] firstbytelabs@gmail.com