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What Intuit knows about its users
- felixfbecker 7y agoI wonder if Mint is GDPR compliant? I am an EU citizen with an American bank account that’s linked to Mint
- elliekelly 7y agoA quick look at their privacy docs tells me there’s no chance they’re GDPR compliant. They use the phrase “comply with all applicable regulations” liberally (instead of saying they “comply with GDPR”) which I suspect means they’ve taken the position that for one reason or another GDPR is not an applicable regulation. I suspect any plans to become GDPR compliant will be implemented as slowly as they can manage to get away with.
- r_singh 7y agoI hope mass users/customers of such applications start caring about things like GDPR compliance
- TeMPOraL 7y agoGDPR doesn't apply to US citizens in the US, and I think no other country has a tax-filing software lobby that successfully keeps filing taxes as difficult as possible.
- neilv 7y agoAnd if you use an accountant instead, what software does your accountant use, and does the publisher of that software claim rights to exploit your financial information? (I've been buying the TurboTax personal and small business edition for a few years, on CD-ROM. I've had a protocol with a KVM virtual machine on Linux, in which the image is loaded into a new Windows 7 image, TurboTax installed and updated over the network, and then that image booted without network, and never again connected to the network, before I load last returns' data, and begin entering data for the new return. My sense is that this is probably not sustainable, and, any year, Intuit can make it so that you have to give them rights to your data if you want to prepare your tax return. A couple years ago, I implemented the entire federal form 1040 and some schedules as Scheme code, as an experiment, and it was a huge headache, but doable, for a startup. It seems like an unpleasant/disreputable business to be in, especially if companies are lobbying politicians to make the US tax return process a huge burden, so that people will buy their software/service. And perhaps share their private financial information.)
- Hello71 7y agothere is "Open Tax Solver" for US tax returns now, but it's written in C instead of FP, and the code quality is terrible even for C. off the top of my head, two of the biggest problems were huge arrays instead of structs and horribly inconsistent indentation.
- swiley 7y agoIt doesn't open any network connections or need any data from anything other than the XML files provided by the author. I get that bad code is annoying if you want to modify it but I don't see how that's a real complaint here.
- Hello71 7y agoas a prospective user, bad code makes me skeptical of the computation accuracy.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
- timeimp 7y agoOr, you know, have your federal government implement self-filing online which covers 80% of the population. Tragedy of the Commons at its finest.
- imgabe 7y agoOh sure, I'll just get right on having the federal government do that.
- brown9-2 7y agoWhat is the legitimate argument against this, besides knee-jerk fear of government? They already have all this data and do this work.
- imgabe 7y agoI'm totally for it. I'm just saying it's not that easy for an average citizen to actually do anything about this. It's not like I can call 1-800-GOVERNMENT and say "Hey how about preparing my tax return for me? kthnx!" and then it will happen. It would require a massive, coordinated grassroots effort to overcome the lobbying by Intuit, H&R Block, etc. So saying "Hey just have the government do this!" is fairly useless.
- OrangeMango 7y agoThat's exactly what the IRS used to do (I used it for my after-school job in high school in the 1990s): > The IRS may be saving money as a result of its decision to shut down its free TeleFile program for filing taxes returns by phone, but the move is costing taxpayers millions of dollars, according to a report released by the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2542655/report--shutdown-of-telefile-is-costly-to-taxpayers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2542655/report--shutdo...
- reaperducer 7y agoWhat is the legitimate argument against this, besides knee-jerk fear of government? Fear of government is engrained in American culture. It is literally what the nation was founded on, and enshrined in the documents which established the country.
- homero 7y agoI love Mint but wow do they have more data on me than Google and Amazon combined. I used to think that selling me credit cards is fine but now I'm sure my analytics are sold every which way.
- freewizard 7y agoMining user data on Mint seems relatively understandable as Mint is free service. However, why bother do the same on TurboTax? TurboTax sells $60-$150 per copy per year, it has 31 million users in 2016, that's about $3B annual revenue. Isn't that profitable enough?
- BonesJustice 7y agoYou know what’s better than $3B? More than $3B. I don’t like my information being brokered for someone else’s profit, but the incentives are pretty clear.
- dasanman 7y agoPeople always want more man
- reaperducer 7y agoPeople always want more Automated stock trading platforms operated by massive Wall Street investment banks always want more.
- pandapower2 7y ago"Profitable enough" isn't really a thing. The owners/share holders will always happily accept a bigger dividend payment landing in their bank accounts and then reward senior management for it. Everyone within the company will also happily accept the budget increases and job security that are more likely to happen when profits are growing. So when someone comes into a meeting and says "here is a way we can bring in extra money" no one is likely to say "no thanks, we make enough money."
- kevin_b_er 7y agoNo, under greed it is never enough. The greed of the rich and powerful is never sated.
- drngdds 7y agoIs there anything like a self-hosted alternative to Mint? The automated balance and expense tracking is really nice but it's obviously a security and privacy nightmare.
- bobblywobbles 7y agoAs the author of a free open-source budgeting software, you yourself own all your data, nothing goes off your computer. Of course it's not as fully-fleshed out as Mint yet, but it's getting better every commit: https://github.com/reZach/my-budget https://github.com/reZach/my-budget
- astura 7y agoThe GP expressly mentioned the only selling point of Mint: "automated balance and expense tracking," Mint imports data automatically without any user action. Unless your software does this, your audience will be extremely limited. Budgeting software has been ubiquitous since the dawn of personal computing, that's a solved problem.
- bobblywobbles 7y agoThere's support for this, but it's limited at the moment. Getting OFX supported is a priority of mine (in the meantime, it uses screen scraping to pull transaction data).
- petronio 7y agoHaving looked into this before, the big issue is actually the web scraping. If you don't mind pulling the data manually there's software like GNUCash that can do not only what Mint does but even more. Maintaining the web scraping rules for numerous banks is a full time job (probably multiple) in itself though.
- jbarberu 7y agoI'm using GNUCash. I used to manually go through receipts and check against bank transaction history. That wasn't exactly sustainable so I wrote a python script to take the CSV that most banks will export and spit it back out in a nice and consistent format for importing into GNUCash. I could potentially explore the scraping capabilities of GNUCash, but with my current method it reminds me to pay down my current credit card balance while doing the exports.
- bobblywobbles 7y agoThis is why I wrote free, open-source budgeting software. All of the source is available on Github, and it is available on all OS-es. https://github.com/reZach/my-budget https://github.com/reZach/my-budget I'm tired of people being sneaky and selling all of our information and making billions off of us. Of course, we let them, but only because it's very confusing reading (and understanding) all the legal jargon. (FYI - I'm actively developing this software, so if you have comments or wants, let me know and I can see if I can make it happen for you. Thanks friends of HackerNews).
- OkGoDoIt 7y agoI used TurboTax for Windows for the first time this year to do my taxes. Since I don’t trust them as a company, I set firewall rules to block all internet access to the program and all its other helper programs. It refused to run until I connected to the internet update it. So I let it connect and update and then blocked it again before starting to enter my data. I got everything entered and then tried to output the tax return for printing but it wouldn’t let me finalize everything until I connected it back to the internet to do another update. Why even bother buying locally-run software if it requires an active connection to the internet? Very frustrating experience all around. (Also it’s super crappy software besides, I would not recommend it even if you get it for free. And even after you buy it, they upcharge you at the last second so be ready to pay more than expected. It’s the Comcast of tax software.)
- astura 7y agoIf you don't trust TurboTax as a company why did you use their software? It's not like they are the only tax prep software in existence.