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56% Positive
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#account#plaid#access#bank#data#don#openai#money#more#credit
Discussion (101 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
For example, Coinbase requires logging in with Plaid to... setup auto-pay for their credit card statements. No way to just provide account/routing numbers the good ole way.
There's lots of issues with Plaid but one big one is that banks (e.g big ones like BofA) can lock your account due to suspicious login with Plaid.
https://x.com/kanateven/status/1973793740331368841
Needless to say that it was my last stay with Airbnb.
I'm not the most privacy-focused individual, not nearly as paranoid as I could be, but Plaid's model is an OBVIOUS step too far.
At least there is a process for unauthorized ACH debits. For this blatant breach of privacy, there is nothing.
Requesting full account access for anything other than maybe budgeting software should just not be legal.
It's usually still persistent full access, and given that, the question of whether the user's password also leaks in the process is almost besides the point.
Of course, you're not obligated to use Plaid but I do find the concerns around this quite strange since you're likely exposing account information already.
Also, the routing+account numbers just let them deposit/withdraw money, not snoop on all my transactions and harvest my data...
HR just sees a single savings account that I strictly use for direct deposit. They don’t see my actual savings account or my other purpose-specific checking accounts.
As an aside, I think each permission has to be granted explicitly in Plaid so it's not just getting "root" access to do simple transactions (unless you grant it)
This is far more valuable, they can see what political affiliation you have based on your campaign donations, predict things like cheating on your wife & the impending divorce, what vices you have and they can also build shadow profiles of all the people you give and receive money from even if they don't use the product.
The difference is that banking records are harder to falsify, so there’s that.
You can get a pretty good estimate just by looking at other demographic factors like age, education level, income, and zip code. Moreover, how many people actually donate to campaigns?
>predict things like cheating on your wife & the impending divorce, what vices you have and they can also build shadow profiles of all of the people you give and receive money from even if they don't use the product.
Google has all this capability for at least a decade. What concrete harms have actually materialized?
Whenever I've been forced to use Plaid, I use a throw away "free-checking" bank account that has $1 in it.
I guess birds of a feather flock together.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-36
Rather than Skynet grabbing all access it can uninvited, I feel like the more realistic mythological analogy for hypothetical AI doom is actually dining with faeries: Nobody's forcing you too, but their food just looks sooo delicious... Or, to stick with the symbolism of open doors, it'll definitely be us having invited the vampires across our thresholds.
BUT there’s just things that nobody should be doing ever, like give it access to your production system or bank account.
I think until proven otherwise, it's fair to consider financial data public information at this point. If we want to change that, I think it'll take way more than just not granting ChatGPT access to your bank account (although it'll definitely include it).
Nothing wrong about with giving them access to your bank or savings accounts /s
A single web search through LLM can now pull malicious instructions from the web into LLM context, and instruct it to exfiltrate financial information. This has been done already with LLM email integrations.
This exactly the same shit Zuck did with Facebook. Hell with them all.
I wouldn't want to share my financial data with OpenAI but for the average consumer the ship has sailed.
OpenAI is just a new-ish player.
Reminds me of the underpant gnomes in many ways
Collect underpants ???AI??? Profit
I guess I’m not seeing the systemic failure mode with a Plaid hook-up? The worst case is it sends a bunch of peoples’ money into the aether. That sucks for them and for OpenAI. But I’m not seeing it e.g. collapsing a bank.
But yeah, can't have a systemic failure in the grift economy.
I never expected to be nostalgic for those days.
Don’t use debit cards online.
That's a commonly propagated falsehood. Both legally (Regulation E) and practically (all large card networks require issuers to extend a zero-liability policy to debit cards), consumer protections are very similar.
The big difference is that, as you say, with a debit card you're potentially out the money for a few days, which can be unpleasant if it makes the direct debit or check for your rent bounce.
If it needs to see transactions, just have your salary deposited there, then an automatic transfer the same day to your real account?
The endgame I see is that it will be illegal to communicate on the internet without having a proven bank account. At least in the USA where all ID verification is settling on banks (ie, Plaid). And the banks will tolerate 10,000 false positive denials of service to avoid a single false negative and be happy about it. Plaid even more so. Human beings will have no recourse as they are private companies. This really should be a service that the states of the federal government provide. It's a dark future we're speeding towards.
"Leadership" today is monkey-see, monkey-do.
See also: Sign in with Google on every web site, even if you don't have a Google account; and Cloudflare interrupting your web surfing every six minutes to make sure you haven't be absorbed by the Borg.
It feels like an arms race on who’s gonna become the Microsoft of the 90s, trying to own and provide everything.
I think it will play out in the same way