Snoop is a free money app. A user connects their bank accounts, credit cards and savings, and Snoop reads the transactions and balances to suggest cheaper bills and deals. The bank data comes through open banking, from Tink, which Snoop's privacy policy names as its "Open Banking data aggregator". In July 2023 Vanquis Banking Group, a bank for credit cards, loans and car finance, bought Snoop.
The same policy says what a bank statement can show. A payment to a political party "could reveal your political beliefs", and other transactions "could contain data about your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, philosophical beliefs or trade union membership, as well as health data or data concerning your sex life or sexual orientation." Snoop also collects what it calls Vulnerability Information, such as "whether you are living with a mental illness or physical disability", and it uses profiling "to understand and ascertain your potential level of financial resilience".
The policy opens with "we never sell any of your personal information". Further down it sets out how the free app is paid for. Partners may pay Snoop when a user switches to them on its suggestion. Snoop may provide "aggregated market research services to other businesses" made from pooled data, "in return for revenue", and for that it shares data with "our data-science partner Starcount". It also "may provide registration information and spending data to third party companies to allow them to build lookalike digital audiences to market to." Registration information, by the same policy, is a person's "mobile number, email, address, date of birth and legal first and last name". A lookalike audience starts from real people: the company that receives them finds others who resemble them and markets to those. Snoop says each user is removed from the audience that results, so they are not shown ads based on their own spending.
Snoop's policy also lets it share data with "Vanquis Banking Group and its entities" to "complete credit or savings behavioural analysis". The Vanquis privacy notice lists USnoop Ltd among the group companies that may process personal data, and says data is shared across the group "for profiling and market research" and "to enable assessment of lending risks by considering all the products you have across the group of companies". When it announced the purchase, Vanquis said Snoop "helps businesses understand emerging consumer spending trends by analysing customer spending habits and transactions on its platform".
What it shows
A bank statement records where a person shops, on which days, and what they pay for. In 2015 researchers at MIT studied three months of card records for 1.1 million people, with no names, account numbers or obvious identifiers, and found that four purchases, each a shop and a day, were enough to single out 90% of them. Knowing the amount of each purchase raised the risk further. Snoop calls its pooled data "totally anonymous". The study measured how hard that is to achieve with spending.
Snoop's policy also tells users that "the partners you have used may still have data about you", and that each has to be asked on its own to delete it.
For your own record
Ask Snoop for a copy of what it holds on you, including any Vulnerability Information and any profile of your financial resilience. Ask it to stop using your data for market research and for building advertising audiences: Snoop's policy rests both on its legitimate interests, and the UK's data regulator says you can object to that. When you leave, ask Snoop to delete your data, and send the same request to each partner you used through it: Bondsmith if you opened a savings account, Equifax if you viewed your credit score. Keep each reply.