Security & Privacy

Angelfish is being developed with your security & privacy in mind from day one. We would never put all our personal financial data into a Cloud service which can be compromised, so we don’t expect our users to either. As a result Angelfish is designed as a Desktop app that you download and run locally on your computer, with your data stored locally on your computer. This means that we never store any of your financial data on our own systems, and you have complete control to secure your financial data in Angelfish yourself.

The downside of being a local-first, Desktop app, is unlike a Cloud app, where your data is stored centrally in the Cloud, you are responsible for having to back up and secure your own data, and it won’t support multi-device, multi-user features initially. However, we are working on a new Peer-to-Peer architecutre which will deliver complete privacy and ownership of their data to users using powerful encryption techniques, while also enabling backups, multi-device, multi-user features through a decentralised Peer-to-Peer network.

Until this is developed, the Desktop app, will allow you to get started using Angelfish, and will manage a local file the same as you would using a Desktop spreadsheet tool like Excel, albiet with a user experience optimised for managing and tracking your finances out of the box!

There are two parts to Angelfish you need to understand from a privacy and security perspective when using the app: The Desktop app itself and the Cloud service which is used to syncronise financial data and in future will manage your subscription to Angelfish.

The Desktop App

The Desktop App stores all your household data as a single file locally on your computer. Just like you would manage any of your other local Desktop files, you can choose where to save the file, and back it up using offline approaches (like a local harddrive or USB drive) or via a Cloud service like DropBox. All your accounts, transactions, categories and other household data are stored in the file. Everytime you create a new household in Angelfish, you are essentially creating a new local file for that houehold to hold all the data for the household.

Unless your computer is compromised (i.e. hacked) no-one apart from yourself, or anyone you share the local file with, will be able to access any of your data in Angelfish.

The Cloud Service

The Angelfish Cloud Service runs on the Google Cloud Platform, which is extremely secure hosting environment used by many of the largest and most trusted Cloud services in the world. The Cloud service provides APIs to do the following:

• Let you login to the Cloud service using your username/password
• Manage your accounts with Angelfish. Each new household in Angelfish will have its own unique Account which contains any bank links and associated subscriptions for that household.
• Syncronise any financial data such as bank transactions from linked Bank accounts, currency exchange rates and other financial data needed to keep Angelfish up to date.

Your username and password are protected using Google Identity Platform, and in future we will add more ways to secure your login such as 2-factor authentication.

The Cloud service uses Plaid to link and syncronise your bank account transactions if you choose to link your banks to Angelfish (you can also manually import your transactions yourself if you choose not to automatically sync your bank accounts with Angelfish). Plaid is used by some of the world’s most popular personal finance apps like Venmo, so you probably already have bank’s linked to it already.

By using Plaid, Angelfish will never have access to or see your online usernames and passwords for your banks and you are in complete control to remove Angelfish’s access to your banks at anytime if you choose to. The only thing Angelfish receives from Plaid is a secure access token, which allows our Cloud service to fetch your bank data via Plaid. We do not store or log any of your financial data on our Cloud service, we only store the access token so when you request your data via our Cloud APIs, we can fetch it directly from Plaid. We merely proxy the data to you via our APIs, and the only reason we hold the access token instead of giving it to users, is because of Plaid’s billing model, which charges us for the number of linked bank accounts we have. To ensure we can remove old account links and not continue paying for bank links that are no longer used, we have to manage the access tokens ourselves.

All account data is stored securely on our Cloud service, in a way that would be hard for hackers to find specific user’s data if they managed to gain access. However in the worst case, if someone did manage to compromise your account, they will be able to query your bank data via any accounts linked with Plaid, which is why we will continue to add more security features to our Cloud API such as 2-factor authentication, and send notifications to you whenever we see unusual activity or logins from a new location, so you can quickly lock down your account if compromised.

However, even in this worst case scenario, because your household data is stored locally on your computer, a hacker will not be able to see any of your other financial data imported manually, your categorisations, notes or other associated data to get a holistic view of your income and expenses. This is in contrast to most personal finance apps today, which store all your data in the Cloud, and would allow anyone with access to your account to see your entire financial data, nicely presented in their UI, with very little work.

Privacy

Please read our Privacy Policy to understand what data we store and where we keep it across our website and the app.