21–30 of 143 posts
Does anyone know if such a thing exists in Europe?
I hope not, because its such a shitshow. You literally give your bank credentials to a third party who then logs in to your account and scrapes info off of it - info that you have no control over. Capital One was smart enough to block them off (which is the bank I use), and now they actually provide proper OAuth based APIs to access your account.
For privacy reasons, I'd prefer to avoid anything of the sort.
I'm interested to see where this goes. I use Plaid as a developer, and it feels like the user experience keeps getting worse. This isn't Plaid's fault, but as more and more financial institutions require 2FA, it gets much less automatic for Plaid to scrape data. Instead of just seeing updated transactions, users frequently need to enter a 2FA code before Plaid can successfully complete the update. This is very clunky…
Does anyone know if such a thing exists in Europe?
I hope not, because its such a shitshow. You literally give your bank credentials to a third party who then logs in to your account and scrapes info off of it - info that you have no control over. Capital One was smart enough to block them off (which is the bank I use), and now they actually provide proper OAuth based APIs to access your account.
Can anyone point to a list of apps/services that use this? For privacy reasons, I'd prefer to avoid anything of the sort.
The apps I know who use Plaid are Drop and Venmo. Some banks use it to instantly link external accounts without having to do trial deposits.
There's been a whistleblower or two on HN about how Plaid scapes and sells your bank account transaction history to third parties. It seems more unethical than most selling-user-data strategies in that the users don't even know Plaid is involved in the transaction whatsoever ; they're just a hidden middle layer. I'd be interested to know if this is still part of their monetization strategy, or if anyone at Plaid can…
Co-founder of Plaid here. This is not true, we do not sell transactional data to third parties. We make 100% of our money by letting developers build financial applications[1]. [1] - https://plaid.com/pricing/
Pretty cool product, considered using it for my property rental's payment portal.
There's been a whistleblower or two on HN about how Plaid scapes and sells your bank account transaction history to third parties. It seems more unethical than most selling-user-data strategies in that the users don't even know Plaid is involved in the transaction whatsoever ; they're just a hidden middle layer. I'd be interested to know if this is still part of their monetization strategy, or if anyone at Plaid can…
Co-founder of Plaid here. This is not true, we do not sell transactional data to third parties. We make 100% of our money by letting developers build financial applications[1]. [1] - https://plaid.com/pricing/
This may be true - but you do still normalize users to the practice of entering their banking login credentials into a web form which is sent to a third party (i.e. yourselves).
In addition I believe the developer gains access to the users' bank transaction history - not just for the duration of their login session, but long-term, which is likely something that users aren't fully aware of in most cases.
Am I mistaken about those?
That is not 'selling' in the historically-used sense of the word, but we are now in a world where 'personal cost' means something different - especially when it comes to services which harvest personal data.
I'm not sure how to feel about this, because I understand that banks' lack of open API access is the central problem. But it seems irresponsible to present Plaid as a secure solution, when its login system is technically a phishing page.
I think a much cooler, probably safer, solution would be a mobile SDK that runs the scrapers directly from the user's phone, instead of on Plaid's servers.
There's been a whistleblower or two on HN about how Plaid scapes and sells your bank account transaction history to third parties. It seems more unethical than most selling-user-data strategies in that the users don't even know Plaid is involved in the transaction whatsoever ; they're just a hidden middle layer. I'd be interested to know if this is still part of their monetization strategy, or if anyone at Plaid can…
It’s the Facebook API issue but IMO transaction data is much more sensitive so it’s a bigger issue. I have used the Plaid API and have no idea how they audit developers to make sure they are using the data as intended and storing that data securely. One hack incident of a developer that exposes bank numbers and transaction data would be a huge reputational hit.
They don't expose bank numbers though, that's kind of the point. Developer access is all tokenized.
That said, plaid does give you access to tons of detailed financial transaction data, and it's easy for companies to tie this to PII in their own systems, and I'm sure many of those companies have less robust security than plaid. As a developer, I thought "Wow, you can get so much data through plaid!" but then as a user I would refuse to ever use a plaid integration because I know how much data it gives them. Furthermore, I don't believe the average user really realizes just how much data they are giving up.
I agree with you, though, it really is similar to the Facebook API issue. All it would take is a third party company packaging data in a way to use it to target political ads and then you've got 60 Minutes exposes all over the place.