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Comment by kryptk | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this, Plaid "kindly requests" you violate the ToS you have with the bank and hand over the keys to your finances.

I have never noped out of anything so hard.

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It would be interesting if an attorney general went after Plaid for CFAA violation.

I'm conflicted on the issue. Plaid only has to do this insane screen scraping because there's no other way to get my own financial data. The details of how it's done pains me, but I also think I should have freedom of choice with my data.

IMHO, the Canadian proposal seems like the ideal solution. Force the banks to offer a secure and more efficient way for consumers to access their open banking data. (This will also massively lower the barrier to entry for another Plaid competitor)

edit: Plaid's docs mention that banks may detect and block this screen-scraping. They frame it as the bank limiting "your ability to access your financial information", which I think is somewhat valid. They're quite obtuse about the whole scraping thing though: https://plaid.com/trouble-connecting/#:~:text=Your%20financi...

I'm not conflicted on it at all. Plaid might need to do this for them to work, but there's nothing that makes Plaid required for anything you do with your banking. People keep mistaking convenience for necessity, and that's how we keep ending up with hacked-together services that leak everyone's info and worse.

I'd rather have no convenience than a convenience that hands off the keys to my life behind my back. And so should the rest of us.

You're basically saying that if a law makes something impossible, then it's OK to ignore the law?

This is how most old/out of date laws/not fit for purpose laws end up being revised.

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