Trust & privacy

Financial software should be clear about where your data goes.

This page describes the current Department of Cash prototype and the engineering rules guiding a future private beta. It is not a substitute for the formal privacy notice and terms that would be required before a public launch.

Right now, your Cash Desk stays in your browser.

The Phase 0 prototype stores the household data you enter using browser-local storage. Department of Cash does not currently operate a server-side customer database for Cash Desk records.

You can download a local JSON backup from Settings. That file can contain household financial information, so it should be stored somewhere private.

After a successful first load, the static Cash Desk application shell may be cached by your browser for offline use. Household financial records remain in browser-local storage; the service worker is not designed to cache future API responses or financial-provider traffic.

No bank password. No money movement.

The current prototype does not ask for online-banking credentials, connect to a financial institution, hold customer money, or initiate payments.

Cash accounts, investment accounts, liabilities, income and bills are entered manually in the prototype.

Private beta changes the architecture, not the trust standard.

A future authenticated beta will require server-side household records. The current architecture plan requires household-level authorization on every request, a mature identity provider rather than homegrown password storage, append-oriented audit records, data export/deletion workflows, and separation of external provider tokens from ordinary application data.

Read-only financial aggregation, if introduced, should use provider-hosted connection flows. Department of Cash should never ask a customer to type a bank password directly into our own form.

Knowing a bill is due is not permission to pay it.

Payment initiation is intentionally outside the private-beta plan. Moving money introduces authorization, fraud, reconciliation, reversal, dispute, provider and legal responsibilities that deserve a separate product and security review.

Trust should be earned in stages.

First, Department of Cash should prove it can organize the household picture and explain its calculations. Connections and payments come only after the underlying security, consent and operational systems are ready.