Privacy
Everything RealChange knows about you, where it came from, and how to make it go away.
LAST UPDATED 14 SEPTEMBER 2026
01We sell nothing, and we show you no ads
Your transactions are used to calculate round-ups and to process your donation. That is the entire purpose. Nobody buys your data from us, because we do not sell it, hand it to advertisers, or profile you for anyone.
02What we store
You: your email address, the charity you picked, whether you are paused, and any monthly cap you set.
Signing in: a hashed version of each sign-in link, plus the IP address and browser that used it. We keep the hash, not the link, and each one works once.
Your bank connection: the name of your institution, and for each account its nickname, type, and last four digits. The Plaid access token is encrypted before it is stored. Your bank login never reaches us.
Your bank feed: every transaction Plaid sends us for the account you link, including the ones we do not round up: the amount, the merchant name, the dates, and Plaid's id for it. Round-ups are calculated from the card purchases among them. Your card number is not part of that feed and we never receive it.
Your donations: each round-up, each charge, the Stripe ids for it, and the reason for any failure.
A log: an audit row for every money event, which is how we can answer what happened and when if you ask.
Machinery: the raw notifications Plaid sends us, so a repeated one cannot be counted twice, and a flag recording that you asked to be removed.
03What we never have
Your bank username and password go to Plaid inside their own interface and are never sent to us. Your full card number goes from your browser to Stripe and never touches our servers. We hold a Stripe reference to the card, not the card.
04Who else sees it
Four companies, each doing one job:
Plaid connects to your bank and sends us transactions. Stripe stores your card and processes the charge. Resend sends your sign-in links, so it sees your email address. Railway runs the servers and the database.
Each of them has its own privacy policy, and Plaid's and Stripe's cover the parts of this that we deliberately never see.
The charity you pick owns the Stripe account, so in its own Stripe dashboard it sees your email address, your card brand and last four digits, and each donation with its date and amount. That is the same as any shop you buy from. It never sees your bank transactions.
05How long we keep it
Donation records stay as long as the charity needs them for its own tax reporting, which is what makes your receipt reconstructable years later. Everything else goes when you ask us to remove it.
06Getting your data deleted
Email leivi@collectivekindness.net and say you want your data removed. We remove your record within 30 days and email you when it is done. The form on the data removal page is not live yet, so the email is the way to ask today.
A person does that by hand today. The scheduled job that would do it automatically is not built yet, and we would rather tell you that than describe a system we do not have. The 30 days is a commitment either way.
Records of donations already made are kept, because the charity has to be able to substantiate them. We can delete everything that is not part of that.
07Cookies
One cookie, which keeps you signed in. It is signed so it cannot be forged, and it is not used to track you anywhere else. We run no analytics or advertising trackers.
08Children
RealChange is for adults with their own bank account. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18.
09Changes to this page
If we start collecting something new, or send data somewhere new, we change this page first and move the date at the top with it.
Questions
Email leivi@collectivekindness.net and a person will answer. RealChange is a small operation, so that address is read by the people who built it.