No bank connection. No card numbers. No credentials we hold. We know which shops are interesting, and which card products you told us you carry — nothing that could be used to spend money.
Last updated 28 September 2026
We never have a card number. Not a PAN, not an expiry date, not a CVV, not a bank login. There is no screen in the app that could ask for one and no column in our database that could hold one. If a feature ever needed that, it would be a different product.
What we do have, once you are signed in, is the list of card products you told us you carry — "this account holds a Blue Cash Preferred" — plus which bonus category you picked on a card that lets you choose one, and any earn rate you corrected by hand. It is saved under your account so a new phone, or a private browser window, gets your wallet back instead of starting empty. It is readable only by you, enforced by the database itself rather than by our code remembering to be careful.
This changed on 17 August 2026, and the old wording is worth stating so the change is legible. It used to say your card list never left your device. That was true, and what it cost was a wallet that emptied itself every time you opened the app somewhere new, with no recovery except re-entering every card by hand.
The offers the browser extension finds are a different thing, and are still sealed to us. Those are your targeted offers, read from your issuer's own site, and their key is generated in your browser and reaches us at no point — you carry it to your phone yourself with the linking code. We hold the ciphertext so your phone and your browser can stay in step; we cannot decrypt it, and neither can anyone who takes it from us. What does leave, anonymously and one offer at a time, is each offer's merchant and terms for the card it is on — see What you add to a card below.
The comparison — which card is best here — still happens on your phone, against shop data our servers send down. It never happens on our side, and we never ask for a bank login.
| What | Why | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| An anonymous identifier | So contributions can accrue a track record, and so votes can be rate-limited and weighted. Created automatically; it isn't linked to your name, email, phone number or Apple/Google account. | Until you delete your account or the app |
| Your email address, if you sign in | To send the one-time sign-in code and to recognise you on a new device. Signing in is optional. | Until you delete your account |
| Shops you contribute about | To record which shop a credit, offer or correction concerns. Looking a shop up sends no identifier with the request, so we don't know who looked. | With the contribution |
| Your contributions | Credits, offers and protections you add to a card, rates you correct, and your "not on mine" answers to what other holders added. This is the shared data the whole product runs on. | Indefinitely; may be retained anonymised if removed, so other people's confidence scores don't silently shift |
| Crash reports and usage | When the app crashes, how it performed, which screens and features were used, an app-instance ID, and the approximate city Firebase works out from your internet connection, sent to Google Firebase so we can find and fix what breaks. Never which cards you hold, your exact location, your email or your account. You can turn it off in Settings, under Send crash reports and usage. | Crash reports 90 days; usage 2 months |
| Feedback you send | What you write in Tell us what is wrong, so we can fix it. | Until the issue is resolved |
On iPhone, Purple Wallet asks for background location because the entire point is that the answer is ready before you open the app. Without it, you'd have to launch the app at the counter — which is the problem we're trying to remove.
Location matching happens on your device. Your phone monitors a small rolling set of nearby shops and notices when you arrive at one. To know which shops those are, the app sends your current position to our servers and gets the nearby shops back. We use it for that lookup and do not store it: we do not build or keep a history of everywhere you have been, and we do not sell or share location data with anyone. The shops you visit are remembered on your phone only, to rank NEAR YOU for how you shop.
You can decline background location on iPhone. The app still works — you'll open it and look up a shop yourself.
On Android, Purple Wallet does not use background location. It asks only for location while the app is in use, and Live mode keeps a visible ongoing notification while it watches for shops. You can decline location; the app still works — you'll open it and look up a shop yourself.
You can talk to Purple Wallet: name the cards you carry, or ask things like "which card for groceries?". While the voice panel is open, audio from your microphone is sent to OpenAI so it can be turned into words. It is sent only while you have the panel open, never in the background. The first time you open it, the app asks your permission and names OpenAI before any audio is sent.
Your phone is given a temporary credential that expires after about a minute; it never holds our OpenAI key. Audio is sent to OpenAI under their API terms, which at the time of writing do not use API data to train their models. We do not record or store your audio; only the words it produced are used, on your phone, to carry out what you asked. OpenAI may keep API audio for up to 30 days to monitor for abuse, then deletes it, and does not use it to train its models.
Voice is optional. Everything it does can also be done by tapping.
When you add a statement credit, an offer or a protection to one of your cards, correct a rate, or your browser extension reads your offers, the app sends that item and the card product it is about — "Sapphire Reserve: $10 monthly credit at Uber" — so another holder of the same card can add it with one tap. It travels with no account, no email, no device identifier and no timestamp finer than the week: what identifies a contribution is a one-way hash of a random value that never leaves your phone, the card and the week, which lets us count "how many devices said this" without being able to tell which device, or link two of your cards together.
An item is checked before anyone else sees it — whether it is about the card itself, about some holders (an issuer's targeted offer), or about one person's account, in which case it is shown to nobody — and it is shown only while more holders say "yes" than "not on mine". This changes an earlier statement on this page: the offers your browser reads were described as sealed to us, and your offer list as a whole still is — but each offer's merchant and terms are now shared this way, once a week, for the card it is on. Turn off Share with other holders in Settings and nothing is sent, and the app stops asking what others added.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. There are no advertising SDKs in the app, and we never read your device's advertising identifier. The only analytics are Firebase's, described above.
You can delete your account in the app: Settings, then DELETE ACCOUNT. That deletes your account, the list of cards saved to it, your sealed offers, and any karma or accuracy record, from our servers straight away, and clears the wallet on that phone. It cannot be undone or recovered, including by us.
If you never signed in, your identity is tied to your app install, so deleting the app ends it.
To have contributions removed as well, email team@purplewallet.app from the device concerned. Depending on where you live you may also have rights to access, correct, or export your data; write to us and we'll help.
Purple Wallet is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 13. We don't knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has used the app, contact us and we'll remove what we can.
Purple Wallet tells you what the community has found and what public card data says. It is not financial advice, we are not your financial adviser, and rewards programmes change without notice. Confirm anything that matters with your card issuer.
If this policy changes materially we'll say so in the app before the change takes effect, rather than quietly editing this page.
| team@purplewallet.app | |
| Publisher | Purple Wallet |