Privacy Policy

Effective: April 2026  ·  Last updated: May 2026

Your financial life is private. This policy explains exactly what Arthea collects, why, where it lives, and what you can do to control it. We’ve tried to write it the way we’d want one written for us.

1. How we protect it

We use industry-standard security practices to protect your information, including:

• Encryption of data in transit (HTTPS/TLS) for all communication between your device and the app.
• Encryption at rest for stored data on our cloud infrastructure.
• Field-level encryption of your most sensitive personal information — names, dates of birth, email addresses, and your saved forecasts are each individually encrypted before they’re stored, so they appear as unreadable ciphertext even within our own database.
• Access controls limiting who can reach the production environment, and logging of administrative access.
• Authentication via Google OAuth, so we never see or store passwords.
• Routine security updates and patching of underlying infrastructure.

That said, no system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever occurs that affects your information in a way that could cause real harm, we’ll notify you and the appropriate privacy regulator promptly, as Canadian law requires.

2. Plain-English summary

Before the legal language: here’s the short version.

• What we collect: the email address (protected by field-level encryption) linked to your Google sign-in, and whatever financial information you enter about your household.
• What we don’t collect: bank credentials, social insurance numbers, government IDs, or anything we don’t need to make the app work.
• Where it lives: on Cloud infrastructure. While we prioritize using Canadian infrastructure, your data might traverse other geographic regions.
• What we do with it: run the app for you. We don’t sell it, share it for advertising, or use it to train AI.
• What you can do: view, export, correct, or delete your data at any time.
• How you can protect yourself: Obfuscate your information & data.

The rest of this document explains all of this in detail. If you ever want to talk to a real person about your data, see Section 14.

3. Who we are

Arthea is a personal-project financial education and planning tool for Canadian households. I’ve been using spreadsheets for a long time now and decided to develop an app for my use. Running Monte Carlo simulations on spreadsheets is quite cumbersome and I wanted to have a more user-friendly interface. So here we are.

4. What we collect

Arthea collects three categories of information:

What we don’t collect: We don’t ask for, store, or transmit social insurance numbers, government identification numbers, bank account or routing numbers, credit card numbers, or login credentials for any third-party financial institution. Arthea is not connected to your bank or brokerage — you enter holdings and balances yourself.

When you enter Personal Information, feel free to mask or obfuscate names or round up numbers to the nearest dollar. Remember you need to educate yourself to have conversations with a qualified financial professional.

Cookies & browser storage

Arthea uses one cookie, and only to keep you signed in.

We use no advertising, analytics, or tracking cookies, and nothing that follows you across other websites. Because the only cookie is essential to signing in, there’s nothing to opt into, so Arthea doesn’t show a cookie-consent pop-up.

Arthea also keeps a small amount of information in your browser’s own storage for convenience — for example, remembering whether you’ve collapsed the sidebar. This stays on your device and isn’t sent to us.

5. Why we collect it

We collect each category for a specific, narrow purpose:

• Account information — secure sign-in
• Household and financial information — to operate the app: produce projections, run forecasts, and show you the analysis you came for. Your data is used to serve you, not aggregated or shared.
• Technical information — to keep the app running, diagnose problems, prevent abuse, and understand which features people actually use so we can improve them.

We do not use your information for advertising, profiling, behavioral targeting, or to train machine learning models. We do not sell your information to anyone.

6. How we use Google sign-in

Arthea uses Google’s OAuth service for sign-in. When you sign in with Google:

• Google verifies your identity and confirms it to Arthea.
• Google shares a limited set of profile information with us — typically name, email address, and profile photo. We only store your email address (kept protected by field-level encryption); we do not store your name or profile photo. We do not request access to your Gmail, Calendar, Drive, or other Google services.
• Your Google password is never seen, stored, or transmitted by Arthea.
• Google’s own privacy policy applies to your interaction with their service. You can review and revoke Arthea’s access at any time at myaccount.google.com.

If you’d like a sign-in method that doesn’t involve Google, let us know. We’re a small project and your feedback is taken seriously.

7. Where data is stored

Arthea’s data is stored in Canada.

8. Service providers

To operate the app, we work with a small number of third parties. We’ve split them by the role they play: some handle personal information on our behalf, and a few receive only technical, non-personal data.

Data processors

These providers handle personal information on our behalf, under contracts (Data Processing Agreements) that require them to protect it, use it only for the purposes we specify, and not use it for their own advertising or AI model training.

• Google Cloud Platform — hosts the running application (Cloud Run), the primary database where your household and financial information is stored (Cloud SQL — Postgres), our secret credentials (Secret Manager), and audit logs that record application activity (Cloud Logging).
• Google Identity Services (Sign in with Google) — verifies your identity at sign-in and returns the limited profile data described in Section 6 (name, email, profile photo). Your Google password is never seen by Arthea.

Other third-party data flows

A small number of requests leave our infrastructure for technical reasons. These providers are not data processors — they receive only the data described below, and they operate under their own publicly posted terms rather than a contract with us. We disclose them here so you have a complete picture.

• Yahoo Finance — when you refresh prices, look up an FX rate, or load a research chart, we query Yahoo Finance with ticker symbols only (e.g. AAPL, VFV.TO, USDCAD=X). No user identity is attached to the request — Yahoo sees that a ticker was requested, not who requested it. The lookup uses the open-source yfinance Python library against Yahoo’s public endpoints; there is no contract between Arthea and Yahoo.

9. How long we keep it

We keep your information for as long as your account is active. You may delete your household, which deletes all your data immediately. This is irreversible. You can also use myaccount.google.com to remove your Arthea’s access.

Some data may persist briefly after deletion in encrypted backups. Backup data is overwritten on a rolling basis (within 7 days) and is not used for any purpose other than disaster recovery.

10. Your rights

Under Canadian privacy law (and provincial law if you live in Quebec, Alberta, or BC), you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you, in a readable form.
• Correct information that is inaccurate or out of date.
• Withdraw consent to our use of your information at any time. Note that withdrawing consent generally means you can no longer use the app.
• Delete your account and the associated household data.
• Export a copy of the data you’ve entered into the app, in a portable format.
• Complain to a privacy regulator (see Section 14).

Most of these you can do yourself from your account settings. For anything you can’t, email us using the address in Section 14, and we’ll respond within 30 days.

11. Household data

Arthea is built around households — groups that may include you, a spouse or partner, and dependents. When you record information about other people in your household:

• You confirm that you have a reasonable basis to do so. Typically this means you’re a member of the household, you’re planning together, and the other person knows you’re using a tool like Arthea.
• You should make those people aware that their information is in the app and that they can ask to see it, have it corrected, or have it removed.
• If a household member contacts us directly to ask about, correct, or remove their information, we’ll work with you both to handle the request appropriately.
• You can obfuscate your household data: spouse and dependent names, birth date and other identifying details. These need not be accurate to use Arthea and educate yourself.

Information about minors in a household (e.g., children for RESP planning) should be limited to what’s actually needed for planning — typically birth year and education timeline, not detailed identifying information.

12. Children

Arthea is intended for adults — you must be at least 18 to create a household. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 18 as a user of the app.

This is separate from including dependent children in a household plan, which is a normal part of retirement and education-savings planning. See Section 11 above. You are encouraged to obfuscate names.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We’ll post the update on the app along with the “Last Updated” date.

14. Contact & complaints

For privacy questions, requests to access or delete your data, or anything else covered by this policy, contact us at arthea.ca@gmail.com. We’ll respond within 30 days.

If you’re not satisfied with how we’ve handled a privacy concern, you have the right to escalate. The relevant authorities are:

• The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca, for federal matters.
• Your provincial privacy commissioner, if you live in Quebec, Alberta, or British Columbia, which have their own private-sector privacy laws.