# How Your Data Flows Through Lums

We've built Lums so your financial information is secure at every step, from connecting accounts to generating AI insights.

## Connecting Your Bank Account

### How it works

- We use Plaid, a trusted financial connectivity provider used by Venmo, Robinhood, and thousands of other financial apps
- You authenticate directly with your bank through Plaid's secure interface
- Lums never receives or stores your bank username or password
- Your bank credentials never reach our servers

### What we receive

- Read-only access to your transaction history
- Account balances and basic account information
- Merchant names and transaction categories

### Security measures

- Bank access tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM (bank-grade encryption)
- Encrypted tokens are stored securely in our database
- Even in the unlikely event of a database breach, encrypted tokens remain unusable without our decryption keys

## Storing Your Financial Data

### Database security

- Enterprise-grade PostgreSQL database with bank-level security standards
- Strict user isolation: you can only access your own data
- Transactions are securely organized for analytics and insights
- No cross-access between user accounts

### What we store

- Transaction amounts, merchants, dates, and categories
- Account balances (with masked account numbers, last 4 digits only)
- Your spending patterns, preferences, and app settings

### What we do NOT store

- Full bank account numbers
- Bank login credentials
- Social Security numbers
- Sensitive personal identification beyond your email address

## AI-Powered Insights (Private by Design)

Most AI-powered finance apps send data to third-party AI providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. Lums does not.

### Our Secured Cloud and Secured AI Approach

We run advanced AI models entirely within our own Google Cloud infrastructure, giving us full control over security, access, and data retention.

### Your data stays within our infrastructure

- AI processing happens only inside our secure cloud environment
- No financial data is sent to external AI vendors
- All access and security policies are controlled by Lums
- Google Cloud provides enterprise-grade infrastructure used by major banks

### Temporary, in-memory processing

- Each request runs in a temporary, isolated environment
- Your financial data exists only in memory during processing
- Data is automatically deleted when processing completes
- No permanent storage of AI-related data or conversation logs

### Strict user isolation

- Your data is never mixed with other users' data
- Each AI request is fully isolated
- Your transactions remain private to your account only

### No AI training on your data

- We use pre-trained AI models provided by Google Cloud
- Your financial data is used only to generate insights for you
- Your data is never used to train, fine-tune, or improve AI models

### Key difference

Other apps rely on third-party AI platforms you cannot see or control. Lums processes all AI workloads inside its own secured cloud environment.

## Your Experience in the App

### Mobile and web security

- All communication is encrypted using HTTPS/TLS
- Secure authentication via OAuth2 (Google, Apple, Facebook)
- Automatic logout after 50 minutes of inactivity

Sensitive data stored using platform-native secure storage:

- iOS: Keychain (hardware-backed encryption)
- Android: Keystore (hardware-backed encryption)
- Web: Secure browser storage

### You remain in control

- Delete your account and all associated data with one click
- Disconnect bank accounts at any time
- Clear your conversation history whenever you want
- Data export feature coming soon (CSV format)