Crowd contribution privacy
Optional crowd contribution helps improve merchant matching for everyone. It is off by default. During first-run setup — right after you create your data file — Big Picture Money offers an easy, encouraging option to turn it on so you do not have to dig through Settings later. You can also enable or disable it anytime under Settings → General → Help improve categorization.
Authentication vs anonymity
Upload requests include an Authorization header so the service can rate-limit abuse. The request body does not include your name, email, device identifier, or account identifiers. The service does not store your name, email, device, account, or user identifier with any uploaded pattern.
Allowed in each uploaded entry
| Field | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Hashes of identifying fields | One-way digests of the payee, description, normalized payee, and email or domain when available — so the service can match patterns without seeing the original text |
| Category name | The category you chose, as readable text (the only readable field in the upload) |
| Category id | Canonical category id when your choice maps to a built-in category (for example travel.lodging) |
| Weight | How many times you reinforced this pattern locally |
| Normalization version | Version of the normalization rules used for the normalized-payee hash |
| Client version | App version (batch metadata) |
Never uploaded
- Raw payee, description, memo, or email text
- Amounts, dates, or currencies
- Account names or numbers
- Transaction identifiers
- User id or email in the payload body
- MCC combined with amounts or account metadata
- Geo location or IP address inside the payload
On your device
The app may keep identifying text locally to power your own learned patterns and the contribution queue. Only hashes of those identifiers — plus the category name — leave the device when you opt in and submit.
How long data is kept
Aggregated anonymous contributions are kept so future merchant-database updates can learn from them. There is no minimum number of contributors required before a pattern can help others, and there is no deletion schedule for this data at this time.