Creeps me the fuck out, and the owners seem to have no ethical qualms about buying, selling, and using this data.
To me, the more interesting and outrageous story is how many aggregators are able to sell garbage data so successfully.
But is Plaid?
And banks do sell account balance data, they also sell credit and debit transaction history
Plaid’s business model is — Company A needs a consumer’s data from Bank B. Plaid takes the consumer’s banking credentials, gets the data, and sells it to Company A.
At no point in this process does Plaid go and sell this data to another unrelated Company C. The lawsuit cited was about Plaid not sufficiently explaining its position between Company A and Bank B to the consumer. It was not about Plaid going and selling the data to the highest bidder.
Any time you hear yourself utter the words "Wouldn't x be f'd if word got out that y"... You need to stop and consider that there is an entire industry around reputation management, and PR crisis management that is leverageable by the deep pocketed in order to keep their name out of news items, and that the favorite acquisition of the absurdly deep pocketed is the media outlet/platform.
Think. The world is full of scummy people looking to make a buck, and a much more pauce number eho worry about doing so honestly. Until you meet one of the rare ones who falls on their sword for their ideals, never assume the guy on the other side of the table is one until proven through deed.
I’m not saying “you should trust Plaid with your data” — absolutely, 100% not that. I imagine that’s how I’m being interpreted, hence all the downvotes.
What I’m saying is that at the present time, it does not seem to me that Plaid would be incentivized to do something that they explicitly say they are not doing. Plaid’s business model is, trust us to get your customers data and deliver it to you, and only you, safely. Selling it to Bob down the street on top of that would threaten their primary business model. And today, that primary business model is doing very well! So why threaten it?
Now, someday in the future, maybe that business model has stagnated, and line still needs to go up, so someone may get greedy and that may change. In fact, this is even likely to happen! But there will be signals that it is coming.
Even re: the issue of misleading users that they are not their bank — after they got slapped down on that one, their strategy changed. There is a new set of regulations around disclosure around these things, and Plaid is pushing them pretty hard. My guess is they had some hand in drafting these regs and are hoping to use a higher regulatory burden to build a moat against competitors.
But honestly, I’m kind of surprised at the lack of nuance in understanding how Plaid works, especially here on HN.
There's hundreds of regulatory actions taken by governments per year. That's "consequence" by definition.
A few food companies have failed due to poor quality control: https://www.thestreet.com/retail/another-popular-ice-cream-b...
In fact, many companies go bankrupt every year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_in_the_United_Sta...
Or any of those budgeting apps that integrate with your bank account.
For that, this very biased training set. And almost always the independent variables used for modeling are 7-10 standard demographics.
Part of the problem though is that much of this data is persistent, across order-of-human-lifetime.
How often does your employer salary history have to be obtained to be useful? Maybe once every 10 years?
I have zero faith that in jurisdictions without national laws prohibiting it (and laws that prevent usage of extra-national data) that's not happening.
You know how some banks have a service which tells you how you spend your money? With graphs, 20% on power, 15% on food, etc?
That service is provided by a third party, who is given the data anonymized. A unique id number assigned. Yet it's trivial to deanonymize, and that's what happens.
All that is required is one buy with a points card, an airmiles card, and you are forever relinked to your data. It's how points cards make cash on the side, how air miles do. Exact time, date, amount, location of purchase is a great sync method.
If you pay for your phone with any form of traceable payment, they know who you are, your address, etc. From this immense data is gleamed, such as lot value, neighborhood, and so on. Companies can even get current location and geofence you, being alerted if you move in/out of a certain location.
Mobile phone companies sell this data/service via an easy api. Companies relink a phone from the app level via IMEI and number, which is sold to aggregators along with phone data (contacts, etc). The telco api links to real identity.
Once linked, forever linked.
Most people love free apps, and give up messages/sms, contacts, and more to save a dollar on an app. From this immense relationship data is gleamed, including likely employer and social circke.
Even if you are careful with your app permissions, certainly many acquaintances of yours aren't, so you get linked to their social circle, often with contact name/address.
This is just the simple stuff.
Source: I've dealt with these companies.
The spam blocker is pretty powerful though, you aren’t getting past it unless you are in my contacts or have a # flagged as affiliated with a reputable business
All of this information can come only through cooperation between banks, credit reporting companies, utilities etc.
Banks might not be directly selling the transaction history, but they report the customer transaction history to Equifax and similar credit scoring agencies. Equifax certainly does onsell that to shady credit companies, which has happened to me twice with letters in both cases stating in the footprint in a very small font size and in a very pale hue of grey «provided by Equifax».
integrate something like this with license plate data, property records, person recognition, and realtime location. when a self-driving automobile detects that it's out of control and unable to avoid imminent liability, it can make a cost-benefit analysis of each prospective casualty by querying an API that provides an avoidance score for each consumer and property in the vicinity. based on this score the client automobile will be able to identify a route of least liability. consumers may be encouraged to integrate with these services by assigning unidentified things a score of zero.
[edit] also, that just happened to be the first time I’d seen a single session represented that way, rather than aggregates. Again, it wasn’t some brand-new thing then, it’d been around long enough to have multiple companies offering it as a service, not just an internal tool at a couple giants.
Not saying it’s a good thing but assume that most websites are recording your session at this point.
I asked our data team what the fuck they need this level of tracking for, and they said "wasn't us, it was marketing that requested it".
So I ask many of the marketing people, and they just say "oh we thought it could be useful!" Without actually clarifying the "how" or "why".
I removed that shit with a quickness after that, and no one's complained so far (duh)
I love the GDPR if nothing else because it scares the - excuse the vulgarity and ableism - retarded decision makers into not doing idiotic shit like this. For any kind of bullshit like this I just bring up GDPR as a shield these days and none of it goes through
This stuff bugs me so much; it all feels so cargo-culty. Even ignoring privacy, I wonder how much money and computing power is burned on buying and collecting data that nobody needs and that doesn't actually serve any significant business purpose.
22 years old, height proportional to weight, poor decision making skills.
What about your son?
I've seen this offered to young kids paying rent:
"Flex lets you pay rent on a schedule that works better for your monthly budget and frees up your cash flow."
"Help you pay rent on time. Improve your cash flow. Build your credit history."
Finally figured it out a day later when reviewing my hike on the Fitbit app. At the end of my hike I forgot to shutoff route tracking. On my way home, I had stopped by Walmart to grab a few things and while there, looked at their ladders. I could see on the app the path I took through the store, including when I stopped for a few minutes in front of the ladders. That was enough data to trigger ads for ladders for the next couple of days.
We leak data about ourselves constantly without realizing how much we're doing it or where it ends up going. Lots of it is also circumstantial and makes me wonder what erroneous ideas some of these databases might have accumulated over the years and who gets to see that "information". What happens if you walk through a part of town where there's an activist rally for "We Love Kitten Torture" going on? Do you forever get tagged in a bunch of databases as an animal torturer?
The latter I absolutely believe. The former I'd file under sci-fi marketing tales that anyone with some amount of knowledge about web technologies wouldn't fall for.
You can get a ton from a worknumber query.
Problem is that people share so much that those that do not start to stand out and might get penalized as well.
Jury nullification.
Or vote, or whatever the site rules permit, good luck with that.
Humans are kind of smart and resistant to manipulation. Especially the ones with money.
I'm not sure. I think gaming/gambling industry having a concept of "whales" kind of disproves this.