SpendScout privacy policy

Effective 4 October 2026

SpendScout: Expense Tracker (“SpendScout”, “the app”) is made by PacketBracket (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what the app does with your information.

Information the app keeps on your phone

Payment alerts (notification access). If you turn on notification access, SpendScout reads the notifications on your phone to find payment alerts from wallet apps, bank apps and bank SMS messages.

• It never reads chat, social media or email apps (such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Instagram or Gmail), or SMS messages from phone numbers and saved contacts.
• It ignores one-time passwords (OTPs), promotions, bill reminders, failed payments and payment requests.
• From each payment alert it keeps the alert text and the details read from it: the amount and currency, whether money was spent or received, the person or business, a reference number and the balance, plus which app or SMS sender it came from and when.
• Alerts that look like payments but can’t be fully read are kept so you can confirm them in “Payments to check”.

Other notifications are only checked for whether they are payment alerts, and are not stored.

Things you add. Cash expenses you type or speak, notes, the categories you choose and the rules the app learns from your choices.

Settings. Your language, country, theme and voice language. To suggest your country, the app reads the country code of your SIM card or mobile network.

All of this is stored only on your phone, in storage other apps can’t read. It is never sent to us or anyone else, and it isn’t uploaded to Google Drive: the app turns off Android’s cloud backup for its data.

Voice entry. When you speak an expense, the app uses your phone’s speech recognition service (usually Google’s) to turn your speech into text. That service handles the recording under its own privacy policy; SpendScout only receives the text.

Advertising

SpendScout shows ads from Google AdMob. To show and measure ads and to prevent fraud, the Google Mobile Ads SDK in the app collects the following and shares it with Google:

• your device’s advertising ID and other device identifiers;
• your IP address, from which an approximate location can be worked out;
• how you interact with ads and the app, such as ad views and taps;
• diagnostic information, such as crash and performance data.

Ads never receive your payments, alerts, notes or categories.

Ads may be personalised using this information. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, the app asks for your consent with Google’s consent form, and you can change your choice at any time in Settings → Ad privacy choices. Anywhere, you can reset or delete your advertising ID in your phone’s settings (usually Settings → Privacy → Ads or Settings → Google → Ads).

Learn more in how Google uses information from apps that use its services and the Google Privacy Policy.

Permissions

• Notification access: to read payment alerts, as described above. You turn it on yourself and can turn it off at any time in Android’s settings.
• Internet and network state: used only for ads.
• Advertising ID: used only for ads.

The app does not ask for permission to read your SMS, contacts, location, camera, microphone or files.

Deleting your data

Settings → Delete all removes every payment, alert and learned rule from the app. Uninstalling the app deletes all of its data too. Because we never receive your payment data, there is nothing for us to delete on our side. For information collected by AdMob, use Google’s controls linked above.

Children

SpendScout is meant for adults and is not directed at children. We don’t knowingly collect information from children.

Security

Your data is protected by Android’s app sandbox and your phone’s encryption. Anyone who can unlock your phone can open the app, so use a screen lock.

Changes

If this policy changes, we’ll update this page and the date at the top.

Contact

Questions about this policy: packetbracket@gmail.com