How we handle your information

Elbie is a personal-finance service in development, built by Santiago and Mateo, MBA students at MIT. It’s an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by MIT. The product isn’t available yet. This website runs a waitlist and optional research questions to help us decide what to build first. This notice covers this website only.

• Your email address, when you join the waitlist.
• Optional research answers: which financial task you’d most like help with, whether you have a store or retailer card, and whether you usually pay card balances in full.
• Optional research permissions: whether you’re open to a research conversation, an optional phone number, and whether we may text you about the research. We save the time and the exact wording you agreed to. Each permission is separate and off unless you turn it on.
• How you arrived: which version of the page you saw, and campaign labels from the link you followed (such as source, campaign, ad, or experiment names and ad-platform IDs). We note whether an ad-click identifier was present, but not its value.
• Our follow-up notes: a status (for example, contacted) and short notes we may add about a research conversation with you. Only the two of us see them, on a password-protected page.
• Usage events: a small set of events such as page viewed, form started, and joined, linked to a random visit identifier. These events never include your email, phone number, or answers.
• Technical data: our hosting and analytics providers process your IP address to deliver the site and receive usage events; our analytics is set to discard it rather than store it. To limit automated sign-ups, we keep a one-way scrambled (hashed) form of your IP address for up to a day. We don’t store the address itself.
• Browser storage: the public pages of this site don’t use cookies (the only cookie is a sign-in cookie on our private admin page, which only the two of us use). The site keeps a random visit identifier, the campaign labels of your first and latest visit, and your analytics choice in your browser’s storage; if analytics is on, PostHog stores a random identifier there too. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes them.

• To keep your place on the waitlist and share updates about what we’re building.
• To contact you about research only if you opted in: by email for a research conversation, and by text only if you also gave text permission.
• To keep track of research follow-ups, so we only contact you in the ways you agreed to.
• To understand, in aggregate, which messages and ads lead people to join.
• To protect the waitlist from abuse.

Your answers aren’t used to make credit, eligibility, or pricing decisions. We don’t sell your personal information, and this site doesn’t use advertising pixels or share your details with ad platforms.

• Vercel hosts the website.
• Supabase stores waitlist and research information, and our follow-up notes, in a private database. It also manages the sign-in accounts the two of us use to view them.
• PostHog (US cloud) receives the usage events described above. Session recording, automatic click tracking, and surveys are turned off.

Analytics is optional. You can turn it off for this browser below. We also turn it off automatically when your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal. Joining the waitlist works either way.

Checking your analytics setting…

We keep waitlist and research information while this project is active, and delete it when you ask us to or when the project ends.

This site is meant for adults in the United States. If our practices change, we’ll update this page.