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0 pointsdiminoten7y ago0 comments

I don't necessarily agree that the first project was unethical, the banks were saying no because they wanted to develop a product of their own to compete with the company that hired you, not because they had any moral standing to prevent the customer from running analytics on their own data. The company you did the work for is immensely helpful to the consumer, and banks refusing to let consumers interact with their own data is, IMO, more of the moral violation than forcibly scraping that data out.

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mindslight7y ago

Even worse, the banks preventing users from straightforwardly accessing their own data is exactly what is pushing users right into the arms of these "fintech" surveillance companies.

The technology (OFX direct connect) and software (Quicken, now Moneydance) for users to privately track their finances has been around for quite some time. But the protocol appears to be getting deprecated in favor of this "web download" rigmarole as banks attempt to decommodify.

I had thought about futzing with Plaid for my own monitoring purposes, figuring since they were B2B they wouldn't be directly surveilling (leaving that up to customers instead). Apparently I was wrong. Surveillance capitalism, indeed!

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0 pointsdiminoten7y ago0 comments

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mindslight7y ago

Even worse, the banks preventing users from straightforwardly accessing their own data is exactly what is pushing users right into the arms of these "fintech" surveillance companies.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse