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I see no point in open banking for me as a customer. The supposed benefits are timid compared to the huge privacy implications. I pass

fsflover 5y ago
Which privacy implications?
- danuker 5y ago
  The attack surface is larger if there are also third parties with access to your account data. Attackers will breach the weakest link. Right now there is only one link: your bank's website.
  - lazide 5y ago
    That is unfortunately not true. There are a great many additional surface areas, such as that time they linked TurboTax to their account, or the time they signed up for budgeting software - and gave it their bank credentials, etc. Most of these being done through screen scraping and by storing users bank credentials in some random 3rd parties database. Which is a huge and tempting target. It’s gotten somewhat better in some cases now as they are at least using SSO type setups, so it’s a track able and expirable token instead of raw credentials at least some of the time - but yikes.
gjs278 5y ago
ok well I do. mint is the easiest example. maybe get some money first and you’ll understand too.
travoc 5y ago
They're helpful if you use portfolio aggregation tools like Personal Capital or Mint. Tracking your overall portfolio balance when you have many different types of investment accounts with different banks is difficult to do by hand. Without open banking APIs, these tools have to collect your authentication information and impersonate you on your banks' websites to collect your account balance information.
frosted-flakes 5y ago
I use a budget app called YNAB (You Need A Budget). It's great, but if I want to connect it to my bank account so I don't forget to add a transaction, I need to literally give my bank account number and password to Plaid, a 3rd party service that logs into my online banking portal as me in order to screen-scrape my transaction data, because my bank does not offer an API. Do you not see a problem with this? Not only is it a terrible idea from a security stand-point, but it's also super brittle and error-prone, because whenever the bank updates its website it breaks the screenscraper.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Gah I was looking into this sort of stuff. I'm sticking to Excel and manual reconciliation like I've been doing for 20 years now. Thanks for the heads up.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    You don't need to connect your bank account to YNAB. It works fine without it; you just need to manually enter every transaction, which you should do anyway. Linking to your bank account is just to catch mistakes and to auto-add scheduled transactions. I would never go back to budgeting in Excel. Way too tedious.

fsflover 5y ago

Which privacy implications?

danuker 5y ago
The attack surface is larger if there are also third parties with access to your account data. Attackers will breach the weakest link. Right now there is only one link: your bank's website.
- lazide 5y ago
  That is unfortunately not true. There are a great many additional surface areas, such as that time they linked TurboTax to their account, or the time they signed up for budgeting software - and gave it their bank credentials, etc. Most of these being done through screen scraping and by storing users bank credentials in some random 3rd parties database. Which is a huge and tempting target. It’s gotten somewhat better in some cases now as they are at least using SSO type setups, so it’s a track able and expirable token instead of raw credentials at least some of the time - but yikes.

gjs278 5y ago

ok well I do. mint is the easiest example. maybe get some money first and you’ll understand too.

travoc 5y ago

They're helpful if you use portfolio aggregation tools like Personal Capital or Mint. Tracking your overall portfolio balance when you have many different types of investment accounts with different banks is difficult to do by hand. Without open banking APIs, these tools have to collect your authentication information and impersonate you on your banks' websites to collect your account balance information.

frosted-flakes 5y ago

I use a budget app called YNAB (You Need A Budget). It's great, but if I want to connect it to my bank account so I don't forget to add a transaction, I need to literally give my bank account number and password to Plaid, a 3rd party service that logs into my online banking portal as me in order to screen-scrape my transaction data, because my bank does not offer an API. Do you not see a problem with this? Not only is it a terrible idea from a security stand-point, but it's also super brittle and error-prone, because whenever the bank updates its website it breaks the screenscraper.

hughrr 5y ago
Gah I was looking into this sort of stuff. I'm sticking to Excel and manual reconciliation like I've been doing for 20 years now. Thanks for the heads up.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  You don't need to connect your bank account to YNAB. It works fine without it; you just need to manually enter every transaction, which you should do anyway. Linking to your bank account is just to catch mistakes and to auto-add scheduled transactions. I would never go back to budgeting in Excel. Way too tedious.