"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.
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.
OpenAI is just a new-ish player.
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
BUT there’s just things that nobody should be doing ever, like give it access to your production system or bank account.
Nothing wrong about with giving them access to your bank or savings accounts /s
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.
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.
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)
Also, the routing+account numbers just let them deposit/withdraw money, not snoop on all my transactions and harvest my data...
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.
Requesting full account access for anything other than maybe budgeting software should just not be legal.
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.
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.
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?
The difference is that banking records are harder to falsify, so there’s that.
This exactly the same shit Zuck did with Facebook. Hell with them all.
I never expected to be nostalgic for those days.
Don’t use debit cards online.
If it needs to see transactions, just have your salary deposited there, then an automatic transfer the same day to your real account?
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.
ernsheong•41m ago
steveharing1•9m ago