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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

#231

Post by mtgx »

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

Pretty much how 99% of this data robbery happens by all surveillance companies.

This is why Facebook is so pissed off at Apple that it dares to ASK users first.

"Most users aren't aware what data is gathered about them" is about 10x more accurate than "users don't care about privacy", even though it's the latter that gets repeated all the time (with some help from the surveillance companies themselves spreading this propaganda).

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

#232

Post by pg_bot »

tadfisher wrote: post #156
pg_bot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be changing. Nacha (the organization that governs ACH) has been developing open APIs so that more organizations can get access to the ACH network without any dirty hacks. I would expect to see a rise in the number of personal finance applications over the next few years due to this fact. https://www.nacha.org/content/available-apis https://www.nacha.org/content/phixius

The problem is that Nacha is building these APIs on top of ACH. There needs to be a universal realtime payment and account-validation network, not a file FTP'd to the Fed that's sent out three times a day.

Take a look at FedNow which is aiming to offer a 24/7/365 instant payment service for all US banks by 2023-24. (I would realistically expect 2028-30 for it to go online) This is being worked on, but everything moves at a glacial pace.

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

#233

Post by casey77 »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #112
smnrchrds wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am sure I will be called naive, but this is shocking to me. I assumed that Plaid was integrating with the banks and not doing this sort of thing because of the people associated with Plaid. Their seed round included Spark Capital and Google Ventures. Their most recent round included Mary Meeker and Andreessen Horowitz. [1] These investors have reputations to protect. This type of thing would certainly come out in d…

Let’s not forget the companies that enabled Plaid to do this. One of the worst offenders was Carta. They made you use Plaid to exercise your stock options. So you had to let Plaid scrape your account info to get the stock you worked so hard for. Most people had no idea they were allowing this.

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

#234

Post by hntrader »

chishaku wrote: post #122
Dwolb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he wanted to tank the deal once they figured out Plaid scrapes financial portals instead of integrates with them.

because you sign a 5b deal and then do due diligence

not exactly the same situation but it happened with NKLA and GM, insufficient due diligence on what was vaporware. mistakes like that can happen.

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

#235

Post by TeMPOraL »

themacguffinman wrote: post #163
TeMPOraL wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's dirty when you couple it with the usual startup BS about changing the world, where the startup was created from day one with an exit in sight.

A startup exit doesn't simply erase all its impact. Plaid made many banking services a lot easier & popular, and it demonstrated how valuable that can be. All that doesn't just disappear. An acquisition/merger can also strengthen a startup's founding ambitions with more resources at its disposal.

Can, but often enough, it doesn't. We end up with a cancelled product/service, or one maligned beyond recognition by the acquirer, with users having to untangle the service from their lives at last minute, while acquirer holds all the IP.

Also, I question the general usefulness of startups created to pursue an exit in the first place. Besides there being often no point in entangling yourself with a service that's meant to be transient, the goals will be different too - the company will try to force hypergrowth by underhanded, and ultimately user-hostile means, vs. letting a thing grow on the strength of its usefulness. Myself, I strongly avoid dealing with any startup that I can smell was built for an exit.

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

#236

Post by thayne »

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…

I've learned that when it comes to banks, assuming things like that is usually wrong.

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

#237

Post by milesskorpen »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #188
tadfisher wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised, because Plaid is far from the first mover in the "scraped banking data API" space. Mint (now Intuit) and Yodlee come to mind, and they use essentially the same sign-in flow and come with the same limitations. There are organizations and companies that are trying to do this legitimately, through open standards and real incentives to both FIs and customers to share information in exchanges: - Open Bankin…

You're right, they aren't the first. That said, when I use accounting software, it's pretty obvious to me that I am going to be sharing my transaction history with the accounting software. When I connect my bank account to Venmo, it is absolutely not obvious to me that I'm sharing my entire transaction history with Plaid. Replicating the appearance of my bank's login screens is critical to the illusion. Even if I did…

Fortunately, Plaid doesn’t sell your transaction history, so this isn’t a concern.

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

#238

Post by odiroot »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #9
paxys wrote: post #3

It would have gone through had Visa's CEO not been so honest at the time of the merger announcement saying that they intended to use Plaid's data to get a leg up on their competitors. > The DOJ cited Visa CEO Al Kelly’s description of the deal as an “insurance policy” to neutralize a “threat to our important US debit business.”

Such a poor comment from Kelly that I almost wonder if it was intentional.

But is it securities fraud?

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

#239

Post by LegitShady »

jjeaff wrote: post #159
f430 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Web scraping is not illegal per se. Though it may be against the specific terms of service of the site you are scraping.

fraudulently obtaining people's banking information can be described many ways. The prosecutors won't call it web scraping and the judge hasn't seen that although he has heard of people who steal users information to hack their banks.

Seems like a bad bet to me.

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

#240

Post by cameldrv »

iancarroll wrote: post #157
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.

I don't think this is true, and Plaid makes pretty explicit claims that they do not do this, i.e.: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655417 - https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/

They do not make such an explicit claim in their privacy policy. There is a carve-out for "affiliates", although what constitutes an affiliate is not defined. They also say:

"We may collect, use, and share End User Information in an aggregated, de-identified, or anonymized manner (that does not identify you personally) for any purpose permitted under applicable law. This includes creating or using aggregated, de-identified, or anonymized data based on the collected information to develop new services and to facilitate research."

This is a cop-out used by a lot of services these days. De-identified data can be and is routinely re-identified. For financial transaction data this is fairly easy. For example, if you buy location data, it's trivial to determine where someone's home is, and therefore their likely identity.

Once you have a set of locations a person visited, you can correlate them with financial transactions. Even just a couple of retail transactions are often unique. You were probably the only person who was at your neighborhood Starbucks on Monday at 6:37am and also at Starbucks on Friday at 7:32am. Your credit card transactions provide a time and a location for every retail transaction.

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