Privacy
Last updated 23 September 2026
Family Investments keeps track of the shares a family owns and the tax that follows when they are sold. It is run by Akhil Sonthalia and offered, free for now, to families invited to try it. It is not advertised and there is no public sign-up.
What it holds
Share transactions and the holdings they produce, across the income-tax files of the people using it: what was bought and sold, when, at what price, and the capital gains that follow. Where a return has to be filed, it also holds the PAN of the person filing it.
For each person signing in it holds a name and an email address. Where Google is used to sign in, it also holds the Google account's permanent identifier, so that later sign-ins can be matched to the same person even if the email address changes.
Each sign-in, sign-out and failed attempt is recorded with its time, the IP address it came from and the kind of device, so a family can see who has been in and sign out a lost phone. These records are kept for a year and are shown only to that family's owners.
Where it comes from
Everything is entered by the family or imported from documents the family downloads from its own brokers — contract notes, trade books and holdings statements. Nothing is collected from anywhere else, and nothing is bought in. Broker passwords are never asked for and never stored.
Share prices are fetched from public market data. That request names a company, never a person.
Who can see it
Each family's records are visible only to the people that family has invited in. One family cannot see another's, and every screen and every notification is limited to the family it belongs to.
Akhil Sonthalia runs the server and the database the app lives on, and so, like anyone who runs a service, could technically read what is stored there. The administration screen he uses shows only how many families, people and holdings there are and when each family last signed in — never holdings, values, trades or PANs. He will not look at a family's own records unless that family asks him to, to help with something.
Nothing is shared, sold, or passed to anyone else. There is no advertising, no analytics, and no tracking of any kind.
Where it lives
On a hosting account in India, in one database, reached only over an encrypted connection. A backup is taken every week on the server, and every day to Akhil Sonthalia's own computer and his Google Drive, encrypted before it leaves the server's hands — so that no family's history is lost to one failed disk. Those backups hold the same information as the app.
What Google is told
When Google is used to sign in, the app asks Google only for the email address, basic profile and account identifier — nothing else, and nothing that would let it read mail, files or contacts. It sends Google nothing about the holdings.
Taking it out, or removing it
Any family can ask for a copy of everything held about it, or for its accounts and records to be deleted — from the app and, as they age out, from the backups. Write to me@akhilsonthalia.com.