Again, I don't see anything shady there. There's two things I see in the settlement about that: 1. They proactively retrieved transaction data when you connect an account. This sounds like an assumption that almost always people are going to want transaction data, so they just do it by default, presumably to improve the first-time user experience so the data's already there when you later request it. This is going to…
Optimizing away user consent for collection and storage of highly sensitive banking transaction data certainly meets my bar for "shady".
I disagree. This sounds like an enthusiastic developer that may or may not have fully described the situation to the PM.
Shady would happen depending on what they did with the data.
Hey, CTO from Plaid here. We don’t, and have not, sold data. https://plaid.com/legal/#consumer-support As someone who has overseen our consumer privacy team over the past few years building out products like Plaid Link and Plaid Portal, I can attest this is a foremost priority for the company. FWIIW, I don’t agree with the allegations, and you can read our POV on this blog post. https://plaid.com/blog/plaids-commitme…
I see a lot of suspicion in thread below, which I very much understand. I'd like to take a minute though to express my frustration with the banks that refuse to supply any sort of limited APIs. How is it 2021 and I still can't give my tax person read only access to a specific year of transactions? Plaid and others trust issue would be so much easier if the banks had any sort of control over sharing aside from none or…
Your banks would need to create APIs with fine grained access to do the things you describe.
Go ahead and explain to a bank who has a STAGE COACH in their logo what an API is and why they need one with fine grained access.
I actually mentioned in a thread about Plaid in 2018 that they sold transaction history to third parties, and the cofounder came onto HN to explicitly deny that [1]. I actually felt convinced they didn't afterwards, as I couldn't imagine such a direct and clear refutation if it were true. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655417
Hey, CTO from Plaid here. We don’t, and have not, sold data. https://plaid.com/legal/#consumer-support As someone who has overseen our consumer privacy team over the past few years building out products like Plaid Link and Plaid Portal, I can attest this is a foremost priority for the company. FWIIW, I don’t agree with the allegations, and you can read our POV on this blog post. https://plaid.com/blog/plaids-commitme…
Hey, CTO from Plaid here. We don’t, and have not, sold data. https://plaid.com/legal/#consumer-support As someone who has overseen our consumer privacy team over the past few years building out products like Plaid Link and Plaid Portal, I can attest this is a foremost priority for the company. FWIIW, I don’t agree with the allegations, and you can read our POV on this blog post. https://plaid.com/blog/plaids-commitme…
While I have you here, as a developer of a financial product myself and wanting to use something to let my users connect their bank accounts to my product via plaid, let me tell you sir that your pricing strategy sucks. There is no way for a developer to pay for plaid use on per user basis and your service cannot be used without having to pay like minimum $500 to you every month even if I have like 10 users. So basic…
Sorry you got hit by that! I work at Plaid -- most of Plaid's APIs can be used without a $500 monthly minimum contract but a few of them do require it -- we know this is a pain point and are currently looking into how can make pricing on these products friendlier to small developers.
Hey, CTO from Plaid here. We don’t, and have not, sold data. https://plaid.com/legal/#consumer-support As someone who has overseen our consumer privacy team over the past few years building out products like Plaid Link and Plaid Portal, I can attest this is a foremost priority for the company. FWIIW, I don’t agree with the allegations, and you can read our POV on this blog post. https://plaid.com/blog/plaids-commitme…
I don't have the time to read and research exactly what happened. I see you settled for a large sum. Thus, I don't believe you. We've all been burned by companies that claim one thing and do the exact opposite. It doesn't matter if legally they are stating things accurately. What matters is how we, a mere human, would believe the plain English phrases used to be construed. Hope you have success and I have no ill will…
I worked at Plaid from when it was less than 50 people to when it was a little over 100. There was no selling of data going on when I was there in any form (anonymized, aggregated, or otherwise). More generally, it doesn't make sense for Plaid to sell data. They already make a huge amount of money on the API. Why jeopardize that? In terms of the settlement size, it actually seems like peanuts to me in comparison to the size of Plaid and the number of affected people. I mean it basically translates into 60 cents a person. This seems more like a payoff to the class action lawyers, enough to make it worth their while but basically nothing for their "clients."
It is absolutely crazy that in 2021, banks still don't have proper secure APIs for other software to interface with. Plaid is a major disaster waiting to happen. Are there any banks moving in that direction? I know of exactly zero in Canada.