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Comment by politician | Hacker News Reader

It looks like Privacy.com is build on top of Plaid.com for handling the backend ACH processing. Plaid.com exposes a ton of personal information to its customers like Income, Assets, and Employment Verification. What is the scope of your engagement with Plaid?

Do you recommend that users should protect themselves from Plaid.com personal data harvesting by setting up a secondary checking account to use with Privacy.com that is trickle-fed from a primary checking account?

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Hi there! We use Plaid for instant bank account verification and for balance information (to ensure we don't accidentally trigger an overdraft). We don't utilize the Income / Assets / Employment APIs. We don't use them for ACH - We build our own NACHA files in house.

Plaid itself takes user privacy really seriously (part of the reason why we're working with them). They don't resell any of your sensitive data.

A secondary checking account is A-Ok with us. Many of our users do this. The only thing I would say is to be careful to use a bank that doesn't assess overdraft fees. We also are allowing micro-deposits for our more security conscious users on a limited basis (drop me a line bo@privacy.com and I'll set you up). Lastly, card top ups is something we're also looking hard at.

As you can tell, unfortunately there isn't a perfect solution yet - we're trying to be a part of that solution.

Thanks for the details. This service is very interesting. Are these cards funded on a prepaid basis (micro-deposits?), or are the ACH withdrawals performed after the fact?

They’re performed after the fact.

Hey! Co-founder of Plaid (plaid.com) here. We take privacy extremely seriously, I'm actually an early privacy.com user and major fanboy. Privacy only has access to the information needed to authenticate your bank account and make sure you don't get over-drafted. They don't use any of our income or assets products.

Thanks whockey. Privacy and Plaid look very cool, and you're both solving interesting problems that need to be solved with the financial system.

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