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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

Do users have any idea exactly what they're giving up here though? Do they have fine-grained permissions to allow read-only vs write access, and to choose between transaction and account level data? And is there anything that prevents those second-party developers from then turning around and selling data to third parties (besides their own TOS with Plaid)?

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What write access would there be?

Obviously this is a hugely sensitive service, I’m not denying that. But there’s a way to do it right and it seems that Plaid is attempting to do that. So I’m not ready to declare them evil before they actually do anything evil.

Many (most?) banking websites allow transferring money through the UI. A screen scraper technically has the same access.

Unfortunately the current approach of the major aggregation players is the only way to motivate the banks to give customers access to their own data through more reliable means.

> A screen scraper technically has the same access.

Sure, but the developer using Plaid's services doesn't.

> it _seems_ that Plaid is attempting to do that

Isn't this a clear parallel to the Google "Don't be evil" approach that gets discarded as soon as the opportunity cost becomes too large to ignore?

Sure, but what do we do? No company should ever be allowed access to data?

It's a big question that I don't have the answer to. I'd prefer we trade off on some innovation on features in exchange for innovating the way we segment and communicate our data. But the market is speaking and it has a different opinion...

It's read-only access.

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