Privacy Policy
What we collect when you use The Finance Algorithm, and why. We handle personal information under the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).
Last updated 1 October 2026
What we collect
- Calculators. They run in your browser. What you enter isn't sent to us unless you ask the AI assistant about it.
- The AI assistant. Your question, and any calculator inputs and results you ask it about, go to our AI provider (OpenAI or Anthropic) to write the answer, and may be looked up with a web search provider (Tavily). We keep a private log of questions and answers on Discord to check quality and fix mistakes. It holds no IP address or other identifier, but please leave names, contact details and account numbers out of your questions. To stop abuse, the server counts each visitor's questions for a few minutes under a one-way hash of their IP address, in memory only; the count is never stored or logged.
- Saved chats. Your chat history stays in your own browser's storage, not on our servers. Clearing your browser data deletes it.
- Contact form. Your name, email address and message, used only to reply to you.
- Technical data. Cloudflare, which delivers and protects the site, processes your IP address, browser type and the pages you request. We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and doesn't follow you to other sites.
Ads and cookies
The site shows ads from Google AdSense. The site itself sets no tracking cookies; Google and its partners do, to show and measure ads.
- Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites.
- Google's use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners serve ads to you based on your visits to this site and/or other sites on the Internet.
- You can turn off personalised ads in Google's Ads Settings, and opt out of other vendors' personalised-ad cookies at aboutads.info.
- Visitors in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland are asked for consent before personalised ads are shown.
Google explains how it uses data from sites that show its ads at policies.google.com.
Who else handles it
Only the services named above, and only to run the site: Cloudflare and Oracle Cloud (hosting), OpenAI, Anthropic and Tavily (the assistant), Discord (the assistant log), Resend (contact email) and Google (ads). Some of them process data outside Australia, including in the United States. We never sell personal information.
How long we keep it
Contact messages and the assistant log are kept only as long as they are useful for replying to you and improving the site, then deleted.
Your choices
You can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, or raise a concern, through the contact page. If you're not satisfied with our reply, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
The site is meant for adults. If this policy changes, this page and the date at the top change with it.