Plaid settled $58M lawsuit over alleged consumer data sharing

https://finledger.com/2021/08/09/plaid-settled-58-million-lawsuit-over-alleged-consumer-data-sharing/

by exotree • 5 years ago

256 147 5 years ago

ve55• 5 years ago

It is particularly sad how common scenarios this are for users, especially in the US. I have known how terrible applications like Plaid (and alternatives) were, but at various points have been required to use them to do something like pay my rent (this is also a very common theme in my life: I strongly dislike a certain company or app, but find myself required to use them regardless, even knowing that my usage and information will be abused).

Giving my full credentials and my security question answer in plaintext to a third party in order to 'link my bank accounts', and then having them scrape every bit of information they can from my personal banking statements and sell it is... nothing short of a nightmare scenario, from many standpoints (user security, user privacy, user education, anti-phishing, and so on).

I guess it's nice to see this class-action lawsuit, but that it amounts to an average of $0.60 per affected user is, well, not particularly inspiring with respect to my hope that things will ever get better here.

Plaid is used by many industry leaders including Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase. When it's not used, usually a similar alternative is. Perhaps the most frustrating part of this is that placing blame on these companies is difficult, as there's no interoperability or open banking APIs that can be used as an alternative.

shostack2• 5 years ago

Part of the challenge is there is no great way to easily get my data out of banks and accessible in one place.

Business model aside, they do solve a real problem in a space where there are no real incentives for banks to provide their own solution.

I'd love to see a subscription-based, privacy-focused option with API access targeting the consumer personal finance crowd. I think Tiller may get some of the way there, but I'm not sure how secure they are.

foxcurve2• 5 years ago

If that's something you're interested in, I'd encourage you to send me an email (check profile). This is exactly what we've been working on for the better part of the year.

trianglesphere• 5 years ago

One problem I have with plaid is that the most common use for them that I see is a company using them in order to setup direct deposit. It's also really hard to figure out how to manually set it up (I usually have to click deny on plaid and then I can input it myself)

I'm not interested in handing over all my info when I can copy and paste two numbers instead

swiley2• 5 years ago

Isn't there a standard API used in the US? GNU cash talks about it some in their documentation but I've never tried using it.

hulitu• 5 years ago

So in US if you have enough money you can do anything and then settle in court if problem arise.

zeroxfe• 5 years ago

Most of the world works this way.

arthur_sav• 5 years ago

The cost of doing business.

pbreit• 5 years ago

On the flip side, if banks are not going to make my data available on a better basis, what choice is there?

WaxProlix• 5 years ago

Something that doesn't fleece and abuse its customers and then expose their data irresponsibly?

edoceo2• 5 years ago

Could we all open an Arbitration Case which may be in their TOS (I'll have to look). Edit: California JAMS

Remember that one company that got "crushed" with bills cause a bunch of consumers use the Arb-Clause as intended? Supposed to block law-suits

newfonewhodis3• 5 years ago

Remember that one company

Amazon? https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-faced-75-000-arbitration...

lutorm2• 5 years ago

Isn't giving your credentials to a third party also a violation of the terms of service with your bank? It seems, at the very least, the bank will just tell you "too bad" if there's a breach and someone drains your bank account using the credentials you gave Plaid. You'd be left suing Plaid.

In fact, this seems like a _terrible_ liability for them. I guess they're hoping it won't happen and if it does then they'll just go bankrupt anyway?

drewmol• 5 years ago

Giving my full credentials and my security question answer in plaintext

FWIW: I've resorted to using a formula to derive my security question answers from the real answer (kept secret) and the text of the question itself. This seems to help mitigate the damage of the q's and a's getting exposed.

d110af5ccf• 5 years ago

I don't provide honest answers to them and discourage my family from doing so as well. I simply treat them as an additional set of passwords to be written down using pen and paper.

mixmastamyk• 5 years ago

Required to use to pay your rent? Don’t think that is enforceable, is it?

prepend2• 5 years ago

Plaids terms are really concerning to me as a user and I’m not willing to give them my bank credentials. My main fear is that they get hacked and my credentials are used to drain my accounts. Plaid waives any liability and my bank doesn’t do much if my credentials are used to do stuff like initiate wire transfers.

Venmo is doing this weird thing where for some transactions they are saying they require plaid to get my bank credentials to log in and “verify.” Of course that breaks my first issue. But it also allows them to suck up and use all of my bank transactions forever.

Seems like a shitty tradeoff just to Venmo money to people.

toomuchtodo2• 5 years ago

I would recommend considering a bank that supports Zelle payments. Cut out the middleman (PayPal/Venmo). Fed Instant Payments are around the corner (2023), at which point instant payments should be available ubiquitously.

https://www.zellepay.com/get-started

prepend2• 5 years ago

My bank supports Zelle and I use it with the few contacts willing to accept Zelle. But most friends don’t, nor do random people who need money. I was trying to buy a book off a street vendor and he took cash app and some app I had never heard of and Venmo, but no Zelle.

eshyong• 5 years ago

This recently happened to me as well - Venmo tried to invalidate my payment method and pushed me to go through their "instant verification" process. Note that "manual verification" (i.e. the deposit method) is still an option on their app, though you may have to remove your current bank credentials and re-add it.

paws• 5 years ago

I recently received a helpful reply about liability from an HN user who says they're a Plaid employee. Thanks @phoenixy!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27982516

While I'm still trying to understand the bigger picture implications, maybe you will find this helpful too.

cmer• 5 years ago

It is absolutely crazy that in 2021, banks still don't have proper secure APIs for other software to interface with. Plaid is a major disaster waiting to happen.

Are there any banks moving in that direction? I know of exactly zero in Canada.

g_p• 5 years ago

The UK and EU have both adopted effectively what you describe under PSD2 - the UK banks in particular were forced by their competition and markets regulator (CMA) to adopt open interoperable APIs.

The end result, now it's available, is that you have 2 levels of API access. One is for access to account information (I tend to think of this as read-only access), and the other is to allow for "payment initiation" (think of it as write access, although not a perfect analogy).

An account information service provider (AISP) can do things like aggregate bank accounts into one view, across different banks. A payment service initiation provider (PISP) can create payment gateways and initiate payments against a bank account using an authenticated session (enabling direct bank payment online, without needing a debit or credit card and the associated infrastructure around that).

You can't just rock up and access the APIs though - I believe you need to get your application approved and engage with the regulator, which is probably for the better, to avoid the "app store problem" of loads of apps springing up in the API ecosystem, asking for permission, then just leeching data to third parties after you apparently consent on page 46 of their terms.

toomuchtodo2• 5 years ago

This is the template for US financial regulators and legislators to implement. Plaid is filling a regulatory vacuum.

Graffur• 5 years ago

From my view, PSD2 has been slowly and terribly introduced. Would love to hear from some people who are AISPs or PISPs though.

sergiomattei• 5 years ago

The problem isn't banks not having APIs, the problem is not having standard APIs for accessing them. The situation wouldn't be any better if every bank had its own proprietary API, hence why Plaid exists.

ydant• 5 years ago

The situation would be better than it is now, even with every bank implementing their own proprietary API. As it is now, the APIs may or may not exist - and a lot of times the fall-back for these services is web-scraping, using the same full access credentials the user has to use to log in otherwise. It's a security nightmare and it's fragile.

At least if the bank implements some sort of API that means some thought was probably given toward using tokens instead username/password, and some thought was given toward scoping the APIs - at least into read-only and read-write capable access.

Although if you read between the lines in some of the service descriptions and backend documentation, a lot of what Plaid (and Yodlee, and others) do is now a mix of scraping and private APIs the banks provide, but those APIs are only available to commercial entities they've signed a relationship with.

Obviously the ideal is public standardized APIs all banks provide with established security-focused practices and read-only limited data access as an option. But proprietary per-bank APIs available to the general public would be a good step forward.

shostack2• 5 years ago

What is the bank's incentive to offer this? Answer that and you'll have the answer to your question.

foxcurve2• 5 years ago

I see it as a differentiator and unique competitive advantage. New banks aren't solely competing on interest rates and fees, but also on social and personal interests.

I'll post a snippet we recently added to our pitch deck:

Accounts like those catering specifically to the LGBTQ+ community (https://joindaylight.com), the Black community (https://firstboulevard.com), individuals interested in supporting renewable energies (https://www.tomorrow.one/en-EU/), and social media creators (https://www.trykarat.com/) have proliferated. Retail accounts catering to the unique wants and needs of software developers is a natural next step.

mjcl• 5 years ago

Wells Fargo worked with Plaid to implement a direct API (incl. oauth) because it meant Plaid would no longer hold onto the credentials of millions of WF customers.

Gh0stRAT• 5 years ago

Chase is the only big US bank I'm aware of which lets you give Oauth tokens with limited permissions to third parties.

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

Capital One and Citi both have OAuth APIs that permit different levels of permissions.

elliekelly• 5 years ago

The only way this will happen in the US is if Congress requires it. The vast majority of the infrastructure to make it happen already exists. Especially with the large custodial banks offering “white label” services.

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

The Federal Reserve could go ahead and do exactly this without Congress's help. You know, actually serve the people and come up with a solution to the changing times like they did with ACH back in the 1970s. That's probably asking too much of our leaders though.

sprawl_• 5 years ago

Regarding Canada, there has been some (slow, small) progress in this area. https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

davidkassa• 5 years ago

FDX is an emerging standard. You can see the members of the group here: https://financialdataexchange.org/FDX/The%20Consortium/FDX/T...

Quite a few in Canada.

bananapub• 5 years ago

it's so frustrating that this sort of shit keeps happening.

1. banks create gap in market by not providing useful access to their customer's data by...their customers

2. regulators don't step in to fix this market failure

3. some company steps in! yay!

4. company decides that charging customers for providing a good and/or service is insufficient, they need to do something creepy with selling off the customers data

5. lawsuit after the fact to maybe stop them being dickheads and definitely enriching a lot of lawyers

why hasn't the FTC or something stepped in to make banks provide some secure read-only access?

mistrial9• 5 years ago

my colleague - you are missing the willing, enthusiastic, extensive and competing-to-out-do each other, aspect of tracking and selling profiles on "customers." I was told a story about a man in Florida making seven figures in the 90s by compliling and selling profiles, that were absolutely not legal and everyone knew it! so now its legal right?

w4llstr33t• 5 years ago

I think companies should still provide a way to link accounts via small deposits. It takes a few days, but at least you don't have to share your credentials. (This applies to US accounts, maybe there are better solutions elsewhere.)

If you use Plaid, I think it should only be if there's no other option and you change your credentials after. I've always thought giving away your credentials to a screen scraping company like Plaid was crazy.

In terms of the class action lawsuit, the only one who will see a meaningful payout from this are the lawyers.

theptip• 5 years ago

Plaid does support this:

https://plaid.com/docs/auth/coverage/same-day/

Their UI makes it really hard to find this option though, because Plaid makes their money from scraping your transaction history, which doesn't work if you do the micro-transaction approach.

As a consumer, I'm not a big fan of Plaid's business model. But to be fair to them, a lot of the security issues come from the fact that until very recently, no US banks had any form of API to allow delegation of access. Based in large part on the success of Plaid, this is starting to change; some institutions are banning Plaid from using the password-based flow, and are replacing this with a more secure OAuth flow:

https://plaid.com/docs/link/oauth/

This is the correct solution to the technical problem at hand. It'll benefit other systems too; for example it should be possible for open-source accounting software to use this flow to export your transaction history in a maintainable way, which previously relied on scraping that's unfeasible for an OSS project to keep up with (but which Mint could afford to implement).

Hopefully the banks let you selectively grant permissions "can view my account list" and "can view my transaction list", or at least surface those permissions, so that consumers can be aware of what they are giving away -- I'd wager that most end users have no idea that Plaid is slurping their transaction history, and would be even more shocked that it's maintaining ongoing access to continue doing the same.

TedDoesntTalk• 5 years ago

I’ve always refused to use plaid thankfully and go with the micro transactions route (2 small deposits and withdrawals from your account).

walrus01• 5 years ago

The "Current" online-only bank insists on using Plaid if you want to transfer money from an existing account to Current. No thanks.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=current...

Also apparently if you want to use Plaid with many different online banking portals, you need to permanently disable 2FA, also no thanks.

nexuist• 5 years ago

FWIW my bank uses 2FA and it works with Plaid. Plaid has a working 2FA authorization process, they might just not have implemented with every portal yet.

echopom• 5 years ago

If all 98 million people were to file a claim, each would receive just 60 cents.

Thank you court of California to incentive startups and GAFA to use our data knowing their risk nothing.

Just to be clear , Plaid has raised 600+ Millions in it's lifetime , this is nothing for them.

akarma5• 5 years ago

I actually mentioned in a thread about Plaid in 2018 that they sold transaction history to third parties, and the cofounder came onto HN to explicitly deny that [1]. I actually felt convinced they didn't afterwards, as I couldn't imagine such a direct and clear refutation if it were true.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655417

tartoran• 5 years ago

So the cofounder was not telling the truth then?

edoceo2• 5 years ago

Correct.

collectedparts• 5 years ago

The cofounder was telling the truth (or, at least, nothing in the lawsuit implies that he was not).

The plaintiffs in this case are claiming that when they linked their bank accounts to PayPal/Venmo/etc using Plaid they didn't realize what they were doing, or that it's somehow unfair that Paypal/Venmo/etc got their banking data (despite knowingly inputting their credentials into Paypal/Venmo/etc).

Paypal/Venmo/etc is not a third party in that case. They're the party that the customer was knowingly interacting with.

A third party would be an unknown / unrelated data broker. Ie, the cofounder is claiming that they don't turn around and resell data to anyone other than the app that the customer was deliberately using.

Justin_K• 5 years ago

Unreal... straight up lies and fraud if you ask me.

NicoJuicy• 5 years ago

Let's see if @whockey has the balls to come explain him.

But, we're not in Japan. So i doubt he will.

newfonewhodis3• 5 years ago

Wow what a jerk. Very, very explicit lie:

Plaid used consumers’ banking login credentials to gather and distribute detailed financial data without prior consent
Allegedly, these actions occurred without users knowing about Plaid’s role is a variance of “deceptive tactics.”

And for all this:

If all 98 million people were to file a claim, each would receive just 60 cents.
The San-Francisco based platform raised a $425 million funding round in April

The current capitalistic system is broken beyond repair. We need stricter corporate regulation (especially in fintech but more broadly) very urgently.

cowpig• 5 years ago

dude you can't just drop a hard R like that on HN

jeandenis9• 5 years ago

Hey, CTO from Plaid here. We don’t, and have not, sold data.

https://plaid.com/legal/#consumer-support

As someone who has overseen our consumer privacy team over the past few years building out products like Plaid Link and Plaid Portal, I can attest this is a foremost priority for the company. FWIIW, I don’t agree with the allegations, and you can read our POV on this blog post.

https://plaid.com/blog/plaids-commitment-to-consumer-privacy...

wheaties• 5 years ago

I don't have the time to read and research exactly what happened. I see you settled for a large sum. Thus, I don't believe you. We've all been burned by companies that claim one thing and do the exact opposite. It doesn't matter if legally they are stating things accurately. What matters is how we, a mere human, would believe the plain English phrases used to be construed.

Hope you have success and I have no ill will towards you.

OnlineGladiator• 5 years ago

This really sounds like you're just doubling down without really responding to anything directly. You say you disagree with the allegations - why do you disagree with them? I understand you probably can't speak to this for legal reasons, but this vague rebuttal is worse than saying nothing at all. It just sounds like typical corporate PR, which makes me automatically assume you're lying.

I don't know the details of this case so I have no strong opinions, but this response makes me trust you less, not more.

akarma5• 5 years ago

Thank you for the response — I know you're likely very restricted in what you can say here, but:

You just settled a claim that you sold customer transaction histories, and from the article linked, the plaintiffs' lawyers claim that you have agreed to implement meaningful business practice changes to remediate these issues.

(1) If you've never sold transaction histories, why settle a lawsuit alleging that you sold transaction histories?

(2) What meaningful business practice changes could you be making if there's no issue to begin with?

(I'm relying on the article here as a source of truth).

phyzome• 5 years ago

Facebook claimed repeatedly that they had never sold user data, and it turns out this was true: Instead, they had bartered user data for increased access or other privileges elsewhere.

I'd like to hear a broader statement on the specific phrasing in this article: « the fintech firm passed on personal banking data to third party firms without user consent ».

squeaky-clean• 5 years ago

So... does anyone here actually believe this comment?

mikeiz404• 5 years ago

I’m guessing this is the relevant section stating that summarized anonymized data is shared.

We may collect, use, and share End User Information in an aggregated, de-identified, or anonymized manner (that does not identify you personally) for any purpose permitted under applicable law. This includes creating or using aggregated, de-identified, or anonymized data based on the collected information to develop new services and to facilitate research.

We do not sell or rent personal information that we collect.

stefan_• 5 years ago

The old overly specific denial. Never did sell the data, but collected and stored it just in case you ever changed your mind about that.

RileyJames• 5 years ago

Based on this, and the blog post, they clearly take issue with the term ‘sold’. Making the users data accessible via api to customers who’ve paid for access to said data does not constitute ‘being sold’, as far as their lawyers are concerned. The fact that 98 million users disagree is unfortunate...

The product was sold as infrastructure, and used as data collection, and 98 million users were not aware of that.

If you’re unable to reconcile why users of square cash would be confused when they hear their data is accessible through some service called ‘plaid’ for which they’ve never signed up, or given their data, then maybe you could start with defining terms as they would, rather than how you’d prefer they sound.

Having data in a database doesn’t make it yours, it’s the users. It was when it was in their bank, it is when you move it to your service and it remains when you provide it to someone else.

mdoms• 5 years ago

Hmmmm could have saved yourself a cool $58 million if what you're saying is true.

lmilcin2• 5 years ago

I don't understand something. Please, help me understand:

"According to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in California federal court, the plaintiffs alleged that Plaid has “exploited its position as middleman” to obtain app users’ banking login credentials and use that information to gain access to and sell their transaction histories. Allegedly, these actions occurred without users knowing about Plaid’s role is a variance of “deceptive tactics.”"

So, the lawsuit is for selling the transaction histories and you say you never did it.

Why do you settle for $58M if you never did it rather than go to court so that they present proofs that, according to your explanation, must be false?

I am not convinced.

Or, the simpler explanation you just lie here to us because you can. But you settle to not go to court because you know you can't lie yourself out of loosing.

chuckcode• 5 years ago

I see a lot of suspicion in thread below, which I very much understand.

I'd like to take a minute though to express my frustration with the banks that refuse to supply any sort of limited APIs. How is it 2021 and I still can't give my tax person read only access to a specific year of transactions? Plaid and others trust issue would be so much easier if the banks had any sort of control over sharing aside from none or authorized to do anything.

didntknowya• 5 years ago

i don't get why you'd settle then. is this just denying it on technicalities?

scottydelta• 5 years ago

While I have you here, as a developer of a financial product myself and wanting to use something to let my users connect their bank accounts to my product via plaid, let me tell you sir that your pricing strategy sucks. There is no way for a developer to pay for plaid use on per user basis and your service cannot be used without having to pay like minimum $500 to you every month even if I have like 10 users. So basically your pricing is hostile towards startups.

rimeice• 5 years ago

Do you sell anonymous transaction data?

fasteddie• 5 years ago

I'm a bit confused reading this. Is the lawsuit that users signing up for e.g. Venmo didn't know that they were also giving their transaction history/whatever to Venmo, or that Plaid was then taking the data passed to Venmo and reselling to, I don't know, a hedge fund?

If it's the former -- I certainly think services need to clearly state what/why/how they are using the data, but it's on the services (like Venmo) and not Plaid.

tehwebguy• 5 years ago

I say this basically every time it comes up but I cannot imagine handing my bank login + password over to Plaid or pretty much any third party ever for pretty much any reason.

RHSeeger• 5 years ago

You're not the only one. I find it staggering that people do this.

meowtimemania• 5 years ago

I’ve used Plaid to login to my bank account. How do I delete all my data from Plaid??

buu700• 5 years ago

I did this recently (well not all my data, but one bank account). I had to go through customer support, and they had some trouble with it but eventually figured it out.

I'm not a fan of Plaid. The core concept is great, but training users to enter credentials (much less banking credentials) into third-party sites is nuts. Nowadays, it would be easy for someone to pivot from a compromise of a random company's web server to impersonating Plaid and pwning most of their customers' bank accounts.

This would be trivial to fix by deprecating their current UI and switching to a small popup or redirecting to a different URL.

jeandenis9• 5 years ago

(Plaid CTO here)

You can use the Plaid Portal (https://my.plaid.com) to view what types of data are being shared, to revoke access (to both the apps and Plaid) and delete data stored in Plaid’s systems. You can also put a data deletion request through support.

Not as per my comment above that we don’t, and have not, sold data. https://plaid.com/legal/#consumer-support

dreyfan• 5 years ago

Why did you settle for $58M in fines when Yodlee does the same thing but they very blatantly sell customer data, and as of yet, remain untouchable?

briffle2• 5 years ago

I have tried to login to this site, registered my phone number, and it says it can't find any accounts of mine. yet I know YNAB uses plaid as its backend, and has links to my banks, credit card companies, and even my mortgage.

Is this a bug, or are those of use that use certain 3rd parties not able to see our data?

lutorm2• 5 years ago

If you change your bank credentials, at least your current data is safe. You mean how to delete the data they scraped?

zaptheimpaler• 5 years ago

98M customer accounts for $58M so 60c a piece. Sounds like they got a great bargain! Justice is served!

a-priori2• 5 years ago

I just read the settlement document, and it looks like this is being reported incorrectly or at least ambiguously.

The allegation is NOT that they shared/sold data to any third parties but that their Plaid Link user interface, where people enter their banking information to add it to Plaid, looks like the customer's financial institution (i.e, uses the bank's branding colours and logo).

Because of this branding, people can reasonably assume that they are sending that data directly to their bank without knowledge, and therefore consent, to share their information with Plaid itself.

If that understanding is correct then this isn't a business practice or security issue, but a user consent issue. That's a problem that definitely needs to be fixed, and the injunctive relief requires them to change the branding and disclosure to make it clearer that people are interacting with Plaid rather than their bank.

But to me it's definitely not a reason to cancel your account or boycott Plaid or whatever.

https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2...

ac292• 5 years ago

Looks like there is some other deceptive stuff going on as well - for example, they apparently collected and stored transaction data even when developers didnt request it (at least, they are agreeing to delete this data now, so it must have been collected in some cases).

a-priori2• 5 years ago

Again, I don't see anything shady there. There's two things I see in the settlement about that:

1. They proactively retrieved transaction data when you connect an account. This sounds like an assumption that almost always people are going to want transaction data, so they just do it by default, presumably to improve the first-time user experience so the data's already there when you later request it. This is going to be changed to only retrieve transaction data on demand.

2. If Plaid's connection is broken (e.g. the user changes their password) then Plaid deactivates the connection but keeps the data. They've agreed to delete the data in this case. The drawback of this change is that since many connectivity issues are going to be temporary, this means that in those cases they'll need to delete the data, then retrieve it again when the user reconnects.

Basically it sounds like they optimized a little too hard on user experience, especially when connecting a new account, and in the process they overstepped user consent. I don't see any bad intent there personally, it sounds like they were just a bit overzealous trying to make the experience super slick.

ahzhou3• 5 years ago

+1. Bad reporting here. This seems to be mostly about consumer disclosure, not that what's happening under-the-hood is different that what your average security-conscious developer might expect after reading that Plaid doesn't sell your data.

That said I think the suit makes a compelling argument that the disclosures should be better.

vmception• 5 years ago

The worst thing about Plaid is the alternatives to Plaid that I've never heard of

There is no secure way to "connect your bank account" in an app. No matter how fancy it looks, or what logo they put up, you are really just giving your username and password to a random person. A random person who may or may not be malicious, but is absolutely a giant target for malicious people.

As for the rebuttals, be nice if there was a way for users to to verify.

tommoor• 5 years ago

Top tip: If you don't want to give Plaid your banking credentials and all of your purchase history (you really shouldn't, irregardless of this lawsuit), just search for jibberish in the "search for bank" option in any app that implements Plaid to get the option to "link manually"…

root_axis• 5 years ago

The bottom line is that users aren't aware that they're giving up 6 months of past and future transaction history to the Plaid integrator when they login using Plaid. This is obviously deceptive.

hamburgerwah• 5 years ago

Modern business in the US: 1) Make big profit doing bad thing that harms consumers 2) Pay fine for doing bad thing that is 10% or less of the ill-gotten profit 3) Repeat

dmitrygr• 5 years ago

Can we, for a moment, talk about how evil the very concept of Plaid is? We are literally TRAINING people to turn OFF 2FA on their bank accounts and give someone else their passwords! Yes, you read that right!

And then we wonder why phishing works so well, and why 2FA is not widely used...

I already advised everyone I know against Plaid, and am working with my bank's local branch to disable any and all access from their IPs, and force anyone whose passwords have been compromised (make no mistake, giving your password away is a compromise) to change their passwords and enable 2FA.

jqpabc123• 5 years ago

Just don't ever give your banking login credentials to anyone ... ever. Just don't do it. You knew it was a bad idea when you did it --- so don't repeat the mistake for any reason.

xyst• 5 years ago

Personally, services that ask for your bank account credentials are a “no go” for me. The passwords themselves are likely stored securely, but the fact they are stored at all is concerning.

All it takes is a bad actor within the company to re-write the screen scraping to then impersonate the users and have them wire out money to a foreign bank account. Some anti-fraud systems might catch this activity but for people that use the wire system on a frequent basis it might go unnoticed.

Or they may screen scrape the information and sell it on the black market. Wouldn’t be too hard to target a specific group (elderly, retired) since you already have their bank credentials which subsequently has reliable/verified demographic information and account balances.

Plaid settled $58M lawsuit over alleged consumer data sharing

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