phoenixy1

> Plaid mines your account advertising (as it says in their TOS/Privacy policy) and shares that info with whoever they want.

FWIW I think this is a slight misinterpretation of our privacy policy. The section on advertising basically just refers to our usage of cookies for advertising and analytics. Plaid does not share personal information without your explicit consent: https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/

I'm sorry for the experience you've been having with support and 2fa -- we're actively investing to improve the story on both of those.

Capital One support has been minimal in the past, but it actually should work MUCH better now that we've switched to supporting them via OAuth. If you are having any problems moving to the OAuth implementation for Capital One, or if you have switched to OAuth and are still having issues, please feel free to reach out to us at @Plaiddev and we'll be happy to help you work through it.

Good question! No, we don't. Our official statement on this is at https://plaid.com/how-we-handle-data/ "Plaid only shares your data with your consent. We don’t share your personal information without your permission, and we don’t sell or rent it to outside companies."

[Discloure: I work at Plaid]

Teller is a much smaller company and operates mostly in Europe, whereas Plaid is much bigger and operates mostly in the US, so this is really an apples and oranges comparison, especially as the ecosystem of connecting to financial institutions is so different across Europe vs. the US. Europe is heavily regulated and provides more standard ways of obtaining data from financial institutions, the US has much less in that regard.

The Teller team as you allude to is proud of their use of reverse-engineered APIs, although IMO this is still relying on undocumented behavior that can change at any time, is subject to being blocked by banks, etc. Basically, it works until it doesn't.

Plaid has committed to moving 75% of traffic to officially supported APIs by the end of 2021. Plaid hasn't said which banks they support via official API versus which ones they support by other means, although there are a few banks/banking platforms that have announced that they connect to Plaid via API, including Jack Henry (supports over 350 institutions), Bank of America, Capital One, US Bank, and Wells Fargo. (Plaid has also created an open API standard for institutions to use, Plaid Exchange, but hasn't published a list of exactly who's on it aside from Jack Henry.)

Plaid supports around 11,500 supported institutions and the list can be found by creating a developer account and logging in to the dashboard.

Plaid, as a bigger company, offers many features and APIs, as well as SDK and client library support for a number of different platforms and languages.

Plaid currently offers a three-nines overall uptime SLA, but things like robustness and performance are going to vary hugely based on your use case and are super hard to talk about in general terms.

Anyway, if you’re considering Plaid for an app you’re building and have any questions, I’d be happy to chat offline (@Plaiddev is a good way to get in touch if you use Twitter).

I know, right? I tried Venmo, PayPal, my own bank...none of them offer it. Even though my bank is one of the biggest banks in the country that has a great online banking portal and my boyfriend and I bank at the same place.

Not everybody is going to be comfortable providing credentials to a third party, I totally understand...but that is what's generally required in the US banking system for API access to bank accounts at multiple institutions, for better or for worse. If it makes you feel any better, we do have info on our security practices (https://plaid.com/safety/) on our site as well as a portal (my.plaid.com) to manage preferences and delete information. We're also committed to moving 75% of our traffic to bank APIs by the end of 2021 and launching OAuth-based authentication for a few big banks in the US soon (so that you don't have to give us access to your credentials at all) -- maybe yours will be one of them! :-)

Oooh, this is relevant to my interests! Some banks do have APIs -- U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Chase are a couple that spring to mind off the top of my head -- but in general they are not really aimed at developers building for specific consumer use cases, which kind of makes sense, since most people don't want to build, say, a budgeting app that only works with their own bank. A more typical customer of these APIs is fintech platform companies like Plaid that will work as a middle layer and make this data accessible via a more standardized API. (Full disclosure: I work at Plaid. We also have our own open API standard, Plaid Exchange, but obviously not every bank is using it.)

Anyway, to answer the question, since it would be something just for my own bank it would be a service that I would use for myself, rather than something that would be a business. So, this is small, but a few months ago I was trying to find a good way to split the rent with my boyfriend, and even though it seems completely bonkers, in the year of our lord 2021 I still cannot find a service that will allow me to make free, recurring, peer-to-peer electronic payments. (My bank offers free peer-to-peer electronic payments with Zelle but doesn't provide recurring functionality; and they offer free recurring bill payments to individuals but only via check, not electronically.) So I might build that.

I didn't read the article as blaming tech. The main takeaway for me was the astonishing under-resourcing of investigation and prosecution of these crimes. If the government can't be bothered to investigate 98% of the child sex abuse cases it already knows about (per Flint Waters's testimony -- which dates from a time when the problem was far less severe than it is now), why does it need to prevent encryption to possibly learn about a handful more cases?

Not to mention:

Congress has regularly allocated about half of the $60 million in yearly funding for state and local law enforcement efforts. Separately, the Department of Homeland Security this year diverted nearly $6 million from its cybercrimes units to immigration enforcement — depleting 40 percent of the units’ discretionary budget until the final month of the fiscal year.

Or in other words, in order to fight the imaginary rapists that Mexico is allegedly sending us, DHS is diverting money originally allocated to investigate actual child rapists.