Privacy Policy

Who runs Jay

Jay is part of Arachnida Apps, which is the controller responsible for the data described here. For any privacy question or request, write to twc@arachnida-apps.com.

Jay does not connect to your bank

There is no bank connection, no card link, no open-banking provider, and no import of statements or transactions from any financial institution. Jay never holds, moves, or touches money, never sees an account number, a card number, or a balance you have not typed in yourself, and asks for no payment details. It is a private ledger of figures you entered — which is also, deliberately, the entire mechanism of the product.

What is stored

• Your account identity, from your Arachnida Apps sign-in: a stable account ID, your email address, and your display name, which is kept in step with the sign-in service each time you visit. Your profile picture is fetched from the sign-in service as each page renders and is not stored here. We never see or store your password.
• What you record: transactions (a description, an optional merchant, amounts, and the dates they happened and settled on), your budgets and the amounts or percentages you allocate, your categories, your goals and funds, and your recurring income and bills.
• People and accounts you name: the name you give someone you budget for (and, if you add one, how they are related to you), and the names you give the accounts you spend from. These are labels you chose; see “People you budget for” below.
• Your settings: your timezone, your currency, your period length, which reminders you switched on, and similar preferences.
• A push subscription — an identifier for one browser on one device — but only if you register that device for reminders. Switching your reminders off stops anything being sent to it; removing the registration itself currently means revoking notification permission in your browser, asking us at the address above, or deleting your account.
• Minimal operational data needed to run and secure the service, such as server logs. There is no third-party analytics and no ad network: no tracking pixels, no session recording, no advertising served to you, and no script from anyone else running on any page of Jay. The one exception to “nothing follows you elsewhere” is a bookshop link you deliberately click on Further reading, described below.

Why, and on what legal basis

The data above is used to provide Jay: to sign you in, to store and display what you entered, to compute your budgets from it, to send the reminders you asked for, and to keep the service running and secure. Where the GDPR or a similar law applies, the legal bases are performance of our agreement with you (running the app you asked for), our legitimate interests in operating and securing it (balanced against your rights), your consent (reminders, which you can withdraw at any time), and compliance with law. Your data is not used for profiling or for automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you.

Who else sees it

Nobody. Jay has no social features — no sharing, no household accounts, no invitations, no public profile, and no way for another user to see your figures. Budgeting for other people means naming who you spend money on; it does not give them an account, a view, or a notification. We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use it to train anything.

Service providers

Data reaches only the providers that make Jay work:

• Arachnida Apps sign-in — authentication and your basic profile.
• Browser push services — only if you turn on reminders, delivery goes through your browser vendor’s push service (Google, Mozilla, or Apple). The message is encrypted to your device; what it says never leaves your budget in the clear.
• Hosting and infrastructure — the server and database that hold your data.

There is no email provider on that list because Jay sends no email at all — no receipts, no digests, no marketing, no “we miss you”. We may disclose data if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, or security of Jay and its users.

Bookshop links, and how Jay is paid for

Jay is free and there is nothing to buy in it. The Further reading page lists the research the app is built on and links the books to two independent booksellers. Some of those links may be affiliate links, which means that if you click one and buy something, the bookseller pays us a small commission through an affiliate network; the price you pay is the same either way. Where a link is an affiliate link it is labelled as one on the page.

What this does and does not involve, precisely:

• Nothing runs on Jay’s pages. There is no affiliate script, tag, or pixel anywhere in the app. The link is an ordinary link; everything happens only after you click it, and nothing happens if you don’t.
• No personal data is sent. We pass no identifier of you, and nothing from your budget, to the network or the bookseller. What the redirect carries is which site sent you and which book you were looking at — the same thing any link tells the page it lands on.
• The cookie is theirs, not ours. After the click, the affiliate network and the bookseller may set their own cookies on their own sites so the sale can be credited, under their privacy policies. We never see your order.
• Reports identify sales, not people. What the network shows us about a sale is a time, an amount, and a commission — no name, no email, no address, and nothing we could connect to your Jay account, because we sent no identifier along with the click.

We do not take money to recommend anything, and no book appears on that page because of a commission. Nothing you record in Jay ever affects what is listed there, because it is the same list for everyone and always will be.

Reminders

Reminders are off until you switch them on, one recurring item at a time. When they are on you get at most one message a day, and only if something you opted into is coming up — four bills on the 1st is one notification, not four, because the question worth answering is how much needs to be in the account. Each is sent once and recorded as sent, so a retry cannot send it again. You can turn any of them off, or revoke notification permission in your browser, at any time.

Cookies, storage, and the service worker

Jay uses a strictly necessary session cookie, set by the Arachnida sign-in service, to keep you signed in, and — if you open the demo — a second strictly necessary cookie holding that throwaway account’s identifier. It stores one small localStorage flag remembering that you dismissed the notification prompt on this device, and registers a service worker so the app can be installed to your home screen, open offline, and receive push messages. Jay sets no advertising or analytics cookies, which is why there is no consent banner. A bookseller or affiliate network can only set a cookie on its own site, after you have chosen to click through to it.

The demo account

You can try Jay without signing up. Doing so creates a throwaway account filled with invented spending, and sets one cookie holding that account’s identifier so the browser can be returned to it. No email address, name, or password is involved, because none is asked for.

The one thing your browser tells it is your timezone, which decides what “today” means for every figure on the screen. It is stored on the throwaway account and nowhere else.

A demo account and everything in it are permanently deleted after seven days, automatically, including anything you enter. That is a real deletion rather than an archive. Nothing carries over into a real account, and demo data is never merged with anyone else’s.

Feedback you send

If you use a Feedback form in Jay, the message you write is sent to Arachnida Apps and reaches one inbox. Alongside it, and only when you send one, your browser and its version, your operating system, your screen size, and the page you were on are attached, because a report about something looking wrong cannot be acted on without them. On the demo’s feedback page this can be switched off with a checkbox before you send, and the message goes on its own. Nothing is collected from you when you are not sending feedback.

People you budget for

Naming someone you spend money on stores their name, and optionally how they are related to you, against your account. That is all: no contact details, no address book access, no account for them, and no way for them to be shown any of it. It is visible only to you. You are still responsible for handling other people’s information lawfully and respectfully, and a person can ask us to remove identifiable information held about them at the contact address above.

Where your data is

Jay is operated from the United States. If you use it from elsewhere, your data is processed in the U.S. and in any other country where the providers above operate, which may have different data-protection laws. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for those transfers.

Your rights and choices

You can correct or delete anything you entered — transactions, budgets, categories, goals, recurring items, people — directly in the app, at any time, including in past periods. Jay stores no derived totals, so a correction to March corrects March and everything that followed from it.

Deleting your Arachnida Apps account erases your Jay data: the sign-in service sends Jay an authenticated deletion signal and the entire record — transactions, budgets, goals, people, reminders, push subscriptions — is removed. To get a copy of your data, or to have your Jay data deleted without deleting your Arachnida account, write to twc@arachnida-apps.com and we will do it by hand; there is no self-serve export or per-app delete yet, and this page will say so plainly until there is. Depending on where you live you may also have rights to access your data, object to or restrict processing, withdraw consent, and — in the EU or UK — complain to your data-protection supervisory authority. California residents: we do not sell or “share” personal information, and we will not treat you differently for exercising a right.

Keeping it, and keeping it safe

Your data is kept until you delete it or your Arachnida account is removed — except a demo account, which is deleted after seven days whether you ask or not. Every query is scoped to your own account on the server, the deletion signal from the sign-in service is cryptographically authenticated and bound to the account it names, and we aim to collect the minimum that makes the app work. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Children

Jay is not intended for anyone under 16. Please don’t use it if you are younger.

Changes

This policy may be updated. The date at the top changes for any edit, and for a material change you will be asked to accept the revised policy before continuing to use Jay. See also the Terms of Service.