wa-ledger — Privacy Policy

Last updated 4 September 2026

wa-ledger is a personal expense-logging bot. You send it a message on WhatsApp, it works out what you spent, and it writes a row into a spreadsheet in your own Google Drive. It is operated privately by one person for a handful of invited users; it is not a commercial product and there is no sign-up.

What it handles

• Your WhatsApp phone number and display name, so the bot knows whose ledger a message belongs to.
• The messages you send it: the text, and any receipt photos you attach.
• A Google authorization you grant explicitly, so it can write to your Drive on your behalf.

It never reads your WhatsApp conversations with anyone else. It only ever sees messages addressed to it.

Where your data lives

• Your transactions live in your own Google Sheet, in your own Google Drive. That spreadsheet is the record — it is yours, you can edit or delete it, and the bot holds no second copy of your financial data.
• Receipt images are stored in your own Google Drive, in a folder the bot creates for you.
• On the server, a small database holds only routing and delivery state: your number, your display name, which spreadsheet is yours, and which messages have been processed. No amounts, no categories, no transaction history.
• Receipt images are copied to the server while a message is being processed. They are stored on a private machine that is not reachable from the internet.

What access it asks Google for

A single permission: drive.file. This grants access only to the files the bot itself creates for you — your ledger spreadsheet and your receipts folder. It cannot see, open, or list anything else in your Google Drive. That is the narrowest permission Google offers for this, and it is the only one requested.

Automated processing

To turn "kopi 25rb gopay" into a structured row, the text of your message — and a receipt image, if you sent one — is passed to Google's Gemini API. This runs on a paid Google Cloud project, where Google's terms state that submitted content is not used to improve Google's products and is not read by human reviewers. A free-tier key is deliberately not used, for exactly this reason.

Who else sees it

Nobody. Your data is not sold, shared, or handed to any third party. The only external services involved are Google's own: Drive and Sheets, where your data is stored in your account, and the Gemini API, which processes your message. There is no analytics, no tracking, and no advertising.

The person operating the service administers the server on which the bot runs, and could in principle read messages while they are being processed. They cannot read your spreadsheet unless you share it with them.

Withdrawing access

You can revoke the bot's access to your Google account at any time, from your Google account permissions page. The bot immediately loses all ability to read or write anything of yours.

Your spreadsheet and receipts stay in your Drive and remain yours — revoking does not delete them. To have your routing details removed from the server, ask the operator.

Children

This service is not directed at children and is not offered to them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Since the service runs for a small number of invited people, material changes will be mentioned directly.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about data held about you: erick.wasimo@gmail.com.