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Banks have been purposefully limiting customers' view of electronic data for years, first by eliminating running balances about 10 years ago and then by limitin
by guelo 11y ago
Banks have been purposefully limiting customers' view of electronic data for years, first by eliminating running balances about 10 years ago and then by limiting online data to 90 days. They do this because confused customers are more likely to pay fees such as overdraft fees, which is where retail banks make most of their money.
Mint complied with the banks' demand to not display running balances but they do display data going back indefinitely in time.
What Mint has shown the banks is how valuable the data is to advertisers. The data is so valuable that Intuit is shutting down their popular $50/year semi-subscription Quicken software in favor of advertising to people via Mint.
In an ideal world a government regulator would step in and ensure data access and privacy. But we do not live in a very ideal world.
- Hermel 11y ago> In an ideal world a government regulator would step in and ensure data access and privacy. No, in an ideal world there would be much more competition between banks, forcing them to offer better services in order to keep their customers.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoGiven that I think everyone here wants banks to give us better data access and privacy, why is the more-competition ideal world better than the government-regulation ideal world in this specific regard?
- maxxxxx 11y agoA while ago I had to look up something about a 4 year old transaction. The bank had the data but for whatever reason would fight tooth and nail not to give it to me.
- superuser2 11y agoI've noticed and been frustrated by that at two different banks. I always assumed it was because banks were hostile to technology and saw their online banking operations as a cost center, a box to be ticked by the cheapest third-world outsourcing firm, without regard for UX. That + 60-year-old mainframes is not a recipe for good software. I recently switched to a university credit union. It's generally less internet-friendly (no mobile app, let alone photo check deposit). But unlike M&I, Harris (when it bought M&I), or Citi, my credit union shows every transaction through account creation, with running balances, on a single lightweight HTML page. Any source on Mint and the banks colluding to not show running balances? I don't doubt you, but I'd love to be able to tell people about it. I'll never go back to a big bank for checking, but I'm still lining their pockets for credit card interchange fees. CapitalOne's 1.5% back is pretty hard to beat.
- eveningcoffee 11y agoI wonder when people do realize that data about themselves is really valuable and stop giving it away for free or cheap and making themselves products that are traded like slaves without anybody asking their permission. What do you have to hide? Everything.