Is Splitwise safe? Data, privacy and who sees your expenses

What does Splitwise ask for when you sign up?

Splitwise says you need to create an account, and registration asks for four things: your name, your email address, your phone number and a password. The email address is required. The phone number is there to add a security layer to the account.

Splitwise says it does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

What does Splitwise say it does with your data?

Splitwise makes three statements that matter, and they come from its privacy statement, updated May 26th, 2026.

• Sharing. “We don’t share your personal information with third parties for marketing purposes without your consent.”
• Its own marketing. It also uses the data it collects “to market our services to you”. The first statement is about sharing with third parties. The second is about Splitwise using the data itself.
• Receipt scanning. A receipt-scanning vendor “may improve the OCR quality… by training an algorithm on receipts you provide”. If you scan receipts, they are part of that.

Splitwise also publishes a short data safety summary. It says “No data shared with third parties” and “Data is encrypted in transit”, and that you can request deletion. The summary is brief and the privacy statement is the longer document, so read both if the detail matters to you.

Who can see your expenses?

You see an expense if you are in it or in its group. An expense with no group is visible only to the people involved in it.

This is the privacy control that matters in daily use. Say you add a $60 concert ticket split with one friend. If you add it inside a group of eight, all eight can see it. If you add it as a friend expense with no group, only the two of you can.

Who can change an expense after you add it?

Anyone involved in the expense or in its group can view, edit or delete it. Splitwise says it does not support group admins or special permissions, so you cannot lock an expense and you cannot stop a group member from changing one.

A deleted expense can be restored by anyone who was originally included on it. Splitwise’s app descriptions also list an edit history for each expense. Splitwise suggests turning on notifications, which email or alert you whenever an expense is created, updated or deleted, and checking Activity for a record of changes. Agree with your group who edits what, because the app will not enforce it.

The same openness applies to groups. Deleting a group removes it for all group members, not just you, and a deleted group can be restored with all of its expenses and payments (deleting or undeleting a Splitwise group has the steps). Say a group of five shares a $2,400 rent expense and one member edits it to $240 by mistake. Anyone involved can correct it, and every member’s balance follows the edit.

How do you limit who sees a group?

Remove the people who no longer need to be in it. On mobile, open the group, tap the gear icon in the top right corner, tap the name of the person and choose the option to remove them. On the web, open the group in the left sidebar, click the gear icon, choose “Edit group settings” and click the red “X” next to the name.

An outstanding balance blocks removal. You first have to clear that person’s balance, either with “Record a cash payment” under “Settle up” (which does not transfer any funds) or by editing them off the shared expenses. Removing someone is therefore a settle-up job before it is a privacy job.

What happens when you want out?

There are two exits, and the second one is permanent. Deactivating closes the account from account settings, and the delete account guide has every click. Permanent deletion of your data “may take up to 30 days and is irreversible”.

Before you delete, settle up and export what you need. A spreadsheet export of a group works on web and mobile. How Splitwise works shows how to settle a balance first.

Who runs Splitwise, and what is not covered here?

Splitwise describes itself as a Providence, RI-based company, and its About page lists Jonathan Bittner as CEO.

This page covers Splitwise’s own accounts and data. It does not cover linking a bank, or the safety of money you send through Splitwise Pay, Venmo or PayPal. Those are separate questions with their own terms.

How does EvenOut handle the same questions?

In EvenOut the group owner decides who can change expenses, and members can be made read-only.

Question	EvenOut	Splitwise, as of October 2026
Who can edit or delete an expense	The owner picks “Everyone” or “Only their own” under “Who can edit”	Anyone involved in the expense or its group
Read-only members	A “Viewer” role can follow along and comment but cannot add or change expenses	No group admins or special permissions
Deleting your account	In the app: Account, then “Delete account”, after you confirm it is you	Deactivate in account settings, then permanent deletion that “may take up to 30 days and is irreversible”

EvenOut also has an opt-in App Lock that asks for your fingerprint, face or device passcode before it opens, and it never shows or sends another person’s email address. Its receipt scanning is a paid feature, and it sends the photo through EvenOut’s server to an AI provider, Google’s Gemini, after stripping the photo’s location data.

What should you do before you trust an expense app?

Read the privacy statement once and decide per expense whether it belongs in a group or between two people. If you want a say over who can edit a group’s expenses, EvenOut is the better fit: the owner decides, members can be made read-only, and Splitwise has no group admins or special permissions. The EvenOut and Splitwise comparison and the best Splitwise alternatives cover the other apps and what each one asks for.