Privacy policy
What data the Telegram bot Ekonomist handles, why it needs it and who it is passed to.
1.Who handles the data
The bot is run by a private individual — Timofey Igorevich Polyakov, self-employed (TIN 614308481385), who also decides how the data is handled. You can reach us at myekonomist@gmail.com — the same support address you see on the Google consent screen.
The service has no employees: support requests are read by him alone.
2.What is collected
| Data | Where from | What for |
|---|---|---|
| Telegram ID, first name and username | from Telegram on first launch | to tell users and their budgets apart |
| The tag of the link that first brought you to the bot — for example “yt” on a link from a YouTube video. Only the name of the platform and campaign, nothing about you | from the link, on first launch, if the link has one | to count how many people came from each platform, which shows what promotion works. Kept with your account and deleted with it; not passed to anyone |
| The text of the messages you send the bot | from you | to work out the amount, currency, date and category |
| Photos of receipts and PDF invoices | from you | to read the total and the date off the receipt |
| Screenshots of the transaction list from your bank app | from you | to read the transactions and show them as a summary before saving |
| Recorded operations: amount, currency, category, date, note, who spent it | result of parsing | statistics, limits, export |
| Names or roles of family members | you set them yourself | to mark who made an operation |
| Settings: currencies, categories, limits, recurring payments | from you | so those features work |
| Support requests: text, photos and files sent to the support bot | from you | to answer the request |
| Subscription payments: invoice number, plan, term, amount, time and payment method | the subscription bot and Robokassa | to grant the subscription, account for money received and refund it at your request |
It never asks for card numbers, account details or identity documents, and it has no access to your banking. Everything it knows about your money is what you typed in or sent yourself. When you pay for a subscription, you enter card details on the Robokassa page — the bot never receives them.
3.Who the data goes to
There are five third parties, and each one gets only what its job requires.
Anthropic (parsing)
The text of the message you write to the bot — and, if you sent one, the photo of the receipt, the PDF invoice or the bank screenshot — goes to Anthropic's cloud service, which extracts the amount, currency, date and category. Today's date, your main currency, the list of categories (the standard ones plus any you have added yourself) and the names of the budget's roles with their aliases go with it — including your name from your Telegram profile until you rename your role: without them the model cannot make sense of “Valeria bought groceries”. Your Telegram ID and other details about you are not sent.
A bank screenshot goes to the model just like a receipt photo, and the bot does not keep it — only the records you confirm remain. A screenshot shows your balance and the names of transfer recipients: send only what you are ready to record.
exchangerate-api.com (exchange rates)
Only currency codes, such as “USD” and “EUR”. Nothing about you and nothing about amounts.
Google (only if you connected Google Sheets)
See section 4.
Robokassa (only if you pay for a subscription)
The subscription bot passes Robokassa (Robokassa LLC) the invoice number, the amount and the plan name — for the payment page and the receipt. You enter card details with Robokassa: the bot neither receives nor stores them. In return the bot gets the payment confirmation — invoice number, amount and payment method. If you give an email address on the payment page, Robokassa needs it for the receipt; the bot does not store it.
Telegram
The bot lives inside Telegram, so your conversation with it passes through Telegram's servers like any other chat. Support requests travel the same way: the support bot passes them to a private Telegram chat where the owner of the service reads them, and sends the answer back from there.
Data is not sold, not shared with ad networks and not used for profiling.
4.Access to Google Drive
Connecting Google Sheets is optional — the bot works fully without it.
If you press “Connect” and confirm access, the bot receives the
drive.file permission. It is the narrowest Google Drive permission that exists:
- the bot sees and changes only the files it created itself — that is, your budget spreadsheet;
- the rest of your files, folders and documents are invisible to it — it cannot read, change or delete them;
- the spreadsheet is created on your Drive and belongs to you, not to the bot.
The spreadsheet contains the same data you already see in the bot: your operations, categories and amounts.
The access key to your Google account is stored in the database encrypted. The encryption key is kept separately and never lands in the database backups; the backup of the whole server (section 5) does contain it.
At any moment and without involving us — on the Third-party apps with account access page. After that the bot stops updating the spreadsheet; the spreadsheet itself stays on your Drive and your data in the bot is untouched.
5.Where it is kept and for how long
The data sits in a database on a server in Germany (Frankfurt, a DigitalOcean data centre). Database backups are made daily and kept for seven days, then deleted automatically. On top of that, DigitalOcean makes a daily backup of the whole server, database backups included: it stays in the same data centre, cannot be reached from outside and is also kept for seven days.
The text of messages sent to the bot is kept in the database (they are not written to the server's logs). It is needed for one thing only: to investigate cases where a phrase was parsed incorrectly. It is kept for 50 days and then erased automatically; the deletion lives in the code, not in a promise. What remains after that is service numbers alone — how many requests the bot made to the parsing service and what they cost; they contain neither the text of your message nor your amounts.
Server logs. The website keeps a request log: the page address, the time, the server's response, the browser type and the IP address with only its first two numbers left (for IPv6, only the beginning) — it cannot identify a visitor. This log is kept for no longer than 14 days. The bots' technical logs — service events and the Telegram ID, without the text of your messages — are limited not by time but by size: new entries push out old ones.
Data is kept for as long as you use the bot.
Conversations with support are kept in Telegram — on your side and in the private support chat: once answered, a request is closed, but the conversation stays so that the history is visible if you ask again. The bot's database holds only the number of its thread in the support chat.
Payment records — invoice number, plan, amount, time and payment method — are kept even after your data is deleted: they are the record of money received. Their link to you is erased on deletion.
After 12 months of complete inactivity — not a single message to the bot, not a single button tap — we delete the budget along with all its operations. Keeping someone's financial records when they never come back to them serves no purpose: that is not care, it is unnecessary risk.
While you have a paid subscription the clock does not run — you paid for the storage. It starts only if the subscription ends and you still do not return.
The bot writes to you in Telegram a month before deletion. Any action in the bot — a message, a button tap or /start — resets the count. Just opening the chat is not enough: Telegram does not tell the bot about it. If you want to take your data first, the Excel export works until the last day.
6.Deleting your data
Write to myekonomist@gmail.com asking for deletion — the budget and all its operations will be deleted. The data disappears from backups within two weeks: database backups are kept for up to seven days, and the server backup that contains them for up to seven more.
Your conversation in the private support chat and the number of its thread in the database are deleted along with your data. You can clear the conversation on your own side in Telegram yourself.
Deleting your data in the bot does not delete the spreadsheet on your Google Drive: it is yours, and only you can dispose of it.
If you connected Google Sheets, when your data is deleted — at your request or after a year of inactivity — the bot withdraws its access to your Google Drive with Google itself: after that the stored key no longer works, including in backups.
7.Security and its limits
Google access keys are encrypted, connections use HTTPS, and the server is entered with a key — a password will not get you in.
Where the limit is: encrypting the keys protects against a leaked database backup — in the nightly dumps they are unreadable. It does not protect against the server itself, or the hosting provider's backup of the whole server, being broken into, because the encryption key lives right there. The bot is run by a private individual, not a company with a security department, and that is worth weighing when you decide whether to connect Google Drive.
8.Children
The bot is not intended for children under 13.
9.Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. We will tell you in the bot about anything substantial — a new recipient of data, for instance.
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