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Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

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Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#131

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

seanieb wrote: post #75

I’ve some friends that works there, so I’m hesitant to say this, because I’m sorry for them, but Plaid is a terrible company. Their main product scrapes financial data from unsuspecting users that simply think they’re making a bank transfer and not signing away the privacy and security of their banking, 401k and trading information. https://twitter.com/seanieb/status/1298871471645761537?s=20

I am sorry to say this but your friends should really give a thought to why they are still working there. I understand that people have families to feed and mortgage, but they should at least consider changing jobs if they are software engineers.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#132

Post by supernova87a »

Grimm1 wrote: post #113
supernova87a wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone works hard, and yes some work harder than others. And no one is saying that tech workers randomly won the lottery and should shut up and just be grateful. But to imagine that suddenly having the fruits of your labor yield 10-100x the wealth that others in life can ever hope to produce, and think that it's just your hard work and not a function of having been blessed both with good talents and an environment…

I think we may be passing each other on the word tech workers -- do you mean everyone who works in a tech company, including customer support, sales, marketing, operations etc or are you defining tech workers as just the people who work with tech, ie engineers, analysts etc. and possibly on the accessibility and rarity because pretty much anyone can get hired at a startup and most startups fail. Most people in startu…

I don't know, yes maybe we're just misinterpreting each other.

I take the original comment at its word -- having to do with those workers for whom a "windfall" however you define it, is life-changing.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#133

Post by marcinzm »

skedaddle wrote: post #79
marcinzm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I thought the typical goal of hackers and startups Hackers and startups are two very different groups with very different ideologies and goals and incentives. No idea why you group them together. Some startups have no technical founders even. >"change the world" and "make a difference" Startups are businesses and like all businesses in the end they wish to make money. VCs, for example, are very clearly investors and…

You're on Hacker News at ycombinator.com and you have no idea why folks here associate hackers and startups?

I associate hackers as a group that startups wants to hire not as having similar philosophies. To me this site is a very successful marketing/recruitment tool and not some indication that YC follows the hacker ethos.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#134

Post by lamp_book »

ngai_aku wrote: post #114
lamp_book wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, awhile back my bank account was decoupled from Venmo for reasons unknown. I unwittingly used Plaid to sign into my bank account instead of the usual wait a couple days procedure. No indication whatsoever - only found out because I saw an article, probably on here, about this company and their basically fraudulent practices.

I was under the impression that Venmo uses Plaid’s APIs on the backend, no?

I don't really know how the integration works. AFAICT you can avoid Plaid if you verify your account manually [1].

https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/221073067-Verifying...

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#135

Post by cameldrv »

novok wrote: post #101
cameldrv wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are selling the data to marketing companies to build a dossier on you, and this could be used for any number of purposes once it is in the hands of data brokers. They're tricking people into handing over the information, and then they're using it for purposes that may harm the victim, so like I said, it's hard to draw a line.

Dont worry, visa, amex and MasterCard already do it directly

That's true, and perhaps the real reason this really is a very valid anti-trust action is that Visa would be removing their only real competitor for providing this type of data.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#136

Post by f430 »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #124
purple_ferret wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these banks never had any APIs. Plaid made its name basically scrapping the html of account pages. Companies used it because there were no alternatives (no apis)

I understand the situation. Another of Plaid's investors is Goldman Sachs. I naively assumed that Plaid's ability to build their product was likely based on access to private APIs available to them based on their relationships and backing. If someone came to me and asked me to build what Plaid has built, I would decline the work. I would assume that impersonating a bank would be illegal. I would assume that the banks…

Back when I used to run a web scraping shop, we had this exact request. I didn't know it was illegal at the time but we ultimately didn't do it because lot of people just want to pay as little as possible for scraping without considering the amount of work that goes behind it.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#137

Post by krisboyz781 »

seanieb wrote: post #75

I’ve some friends that works there, so I’m hesitant to say this, because I’m sorry for them, but Plaid is a terrible company. Their main product scrapes financial data from unsuspecting users that simply think they’re making a bank transfer and not signing away the privacy and security of their banking, 401k and trading information. https://twitter.com/seanieb/status/1298871471645761537?s=20

That's not true. Plaid says they'll be accessing your information literally when you sign into your account.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#138

Post by f430 »

Judgmentality wrote: post #123
dmix wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing it on purpose vs via black/grey market trickery is often treated as separate matters. Even if the legal mode is still full of moral issues that society has yet to fully confront. Phishing people's bank credentials has been fully established as a computer crime (not even just bad within civil law).

I adore the idea of the Plaid founders, and everyone else deemed complicit in a court of law (I think this should likely include investors), going to fuck-you-in-the-ass prison instead of becoming billionaires. Alas, I've lived in Silicon Valley too long to believe that anything moral will ever occur when there's money to be made. It makes me sad that people actually admire this place for anything other than the geog…

Do you think Plaid founders are going to jail?

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#139

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

smnrchrds wrote: post #82
seanieb wrote: post #75

I’ve some friends that works there, so I’m hesitant to say this, because I’m sorry for them, but Plaid is a terrible company. Their main product scrapes financial data from unsuspecting users that simply think they’re making a bank transfer and not signing away the privacy and security of their banking, 401k and trading information. https://twitter.com/seanieb/status/1298871471645761537?s=20

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

> takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it

So does, for example, Yodlee, when you use them to have an API for bank statements. I cannot say if they too monetize the data that opens up to them for grabs.

It took legislation and years of preparation to enforce APIs and interoperability onto European banks (yes, I can now use bank A's app to view my account balance in bank B, while maintaining control over what kind of access I'm giving). Can't see it happening in the US, though, although the demand for such APIs is clearly there, given that companies like Plaid and Yodlee prosper.

Re: Visa and Plaid Abandon Merger After Antitrust Division’s Suit to Block

#140

Post by krisboyz781 »

smnrchrds wrote: post #82
seanieb wrote: post #75

I’ve some friends that works there, so I’m hesitant to say this, because I’m sorry for them, but Plaid is a terrible company. Their main product scrapes financial data from unsuspecting users that simply think they’re making a bank transfer and not signing away the privacy and security of their banking, 401k and trading information. https://twitter.com/seanieb/status/1298871471645761537?s=20

They are getting sued by TD Bank for this very reason: > The bank said in the court filings that the interface "dupes" consumers into believing they are entering personal information into TD Bank's trusted platform. > "In reality, however, consumers are unwittingly giving their login credentials to the defendant, who takes the information, stores it on its servers, and uses it to mine consumers' bank records for valu…

No, that's not the problem at all. The problem is that Plaid falsely used TD Bank without having a relationship with the bank. The company literally has a bank partnerships team so that "void warranty" argument doesn't even make sense.
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