privacy policy
short version: teresa keeps what it needs to track expenses in your chats, sends message text to an ai provider to read it, stores it on our server, and shows it to anyone holding your share link. nothing is sold, nothing is used for ads.
what we collect
- who you are on whatsapp or telegram. your phone number / whatsapp id, or your telegram user id (never a phone number there), and display name. in groups: the group's id, its name at the time teresa joined, and the id and name of each member who sends a message.
- messages. the text of messages sent to teresa in a private chat, and of every message posted in a group teresa is in - including from members who never talk to teresa - because that's how it spots expenses. it records who sent what and when. attachments are different - see receipts.
- receipts. every file sent to teresa in a private chat or posted in a group it is in - photos, pdfs, documents, voice notes, videos; stickers excluded - is downloaded and kept as a receipt, linked to an expense when one matches. the file itself is never sent to an ai provider.
- expenses. what it extracted: amount, currency, category, description, date, who paid, who it was split among, and which message it came from. edits and deletions are kept as history.
- preferences. currency, timezone, and the name you give a chat.
- recurring rules. the ones you set up: a description, an amount when fixed, the day and how often, and which expense answered each period. deleted with the rule; the expenses it logged stay like any other.
- share links. the random token for each link, when it was created, how many times it was opened, and when it was last opened. we don't log who opened it.
- usage telemetry. per model run: model name, token counts, timing, and which tools ran with their inputs and a snippet of their results. this exists to debug and cost the service, not to profile you.
- analytics. we run our own umami (self-hosted, no cookies, no third party) on these pages: page paths, referrer, browser and country class, and clicks on buttons. the share page reports a synthetic path - your link's token never leaves your browser. on the bot side it receives event counters (an expense was logged, a link was created, a subscription was paid) keyed on a hash of the chat id - never a phone number, a name, message text or an individual amount. when we run ads, the landing, docs and legal pages also load google's conversion tag (googletagmanager.com - google's own cookies and policy apply) so a click on "message teresa" can be counted against the ad that brought you; it never loads on the share page.
server logs at the normal level redact message content and mask phone numbers. when debugging is switched on they may temporarily contain both.
how we use it
- to run the service: read your messages, log expenses, answer questions, compute balances, and serve the share page.
- to remember context: recent messages in a chat are given back to the model so it understands "that was 350" or "delete the tacos".
- to keep it working and affordable: error and usage telemetry.
we don't use your data for advertising, don't sell it, and don't build profiles from it.
who else sees it
- our ai providers: openai and anthropic. the text of every message teresa receives is sent to one of them to detect expenses, and conversations where teresa replies are sent to anthropic's claude api to generate the reply. attachments never go to either. both process this as our providers under their commercial terms; by default neither api uses customer data to train models. see openai's privacy policy and anthropic's privacy policy.
- whatsapp / meta. teresa is a whatsapp account, so whatsapp carries and stores your messages under their own policy, which we don't control.
- telegram. if you talk to teresa on telegram instead, telegram carries and stores those messages under its own policy. we never see your phone number there - your telegram user id is the account.
- anyone holding a share link. the share page shows the chat's expenses, balances, payer names, receipt files, and downloads (csv, xlsx, pdf, and a zip of the receipt files) with no login. say "new link" in the chat to invalidate the old one.
- other people in your group. what you post in a group is visible to its members anyway; teresa's summaries and balances are posted into the same group.
- our hosting and storage providers, where the server, the database and the receipt files live.
we disclose data beyond this only if the law requires it.
where it lives and how long
everything is stored in a database on our server. expenses, preferences, chat history, and telemetry are kept for as long as the chat exists so your history stays intact; there is no automatic expiry yet. receipt files are kept the same way; deleting an expense unlinks its receipt but does not delete the file - ask us to erase it. files teresa sends into a chat (exports) are deleted from our server within about six hours. share-page downloads are generated on the fly and not stored.
your choices and rights
- stop collection: stop messaging teresa, or remove it from the group. it only sees what whatsapp or telegram delivers to it.
- fix or delete an expense: tell teresa in the chat ("delete the uber", "that was 350").
- cut off the share page: say "new link"; the old one dies.
- see or erase everything about you or your group: ask us at teresa@lasagna.pizza and we'll export or delete it. we may ask you to confirm from the whatsapp number in question.
depending on where you live, you may have further legal rights (access, correction, deletion, portability, objection). the same contact handles them.
security
share links are long random tokens, rate-limited, and revocable. the server talks to whatsapp, telegram and the ai providers over encrypted connections. still, no system is perfect - don't put secrets, card numbers, or anything you'd hate to leak into a chat teresa is in.
children
teresa isn't meant for anyone below whatsapp's or telegram's minimum age (13, or higher where local law says so). if you think a child's data ended up here, contact us and we'll delete it.
changes
we may update this policy; the date at the top will change. material changes will be noted on the landing page.
contact
privacy questions or requests: teresa@lasagna.pizza.