It won't go wrong if you don't wanna use this feature but if you do then its upto you that you''re trusting a for profit company that much that you provide them with your confidential data.
Until every web site and bank requires you to use it because their CTO saw an ad in an airport that said it was a good idea and makes line go up.
"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.
Little doubt the true motivation behind this is the advertising angle. What better way to advertise to consumers than seeing exactly what they're spending money on, historically and in near-realtime?
All set for a perfect storm with a single exploit down the line. Which could take out so much and OpenAI with it. What a way to burst the bubble, not an if, more a when as so many eggs in that basket and they have yet to invent a solid lid.
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.
Most people don't care at all about their privacy. Apps like Venmo by default will share basically who you are spending time with and what your doing, Strava basically exposes where you live and your sleep/ workout schedule by default.
I wouldn't want to share my financial data with OpenAI but for the average consumer the ship has sailed.
It’s like we are trying to run as fast as possible towards an AI controlled disaster by connecting absolutely everything we can to the AI… even in the worst sci-fi the robots need to steal codes to get access to systems and we are just leaving the door wide open.
We're not trying to run as fast as possible towards anything. It's a bunch of investors trying to run as fast as possible towards the AI controlled disaster, or as they see it, an AI controlled unlocking of value.
I read about a post that in dn42 community where a dude set up an AI agent with access to his Amazon API, which eventually deployed servers generating a bill of $6000.
I feel like every single day OpenAI and Anthropic are entrenching their slopware in everyday products and workplaces with little to no way to opt-out. This is getting dystopian.
I now think AI is a virus, which infects whatever it touches. Not just software, but the books (there're already slopbooks printed, and I'm not talking about fiction books, but rather real textbooks, history, music, art, etc...). In XX years what can you even trust? We will adapt and get around it, but I'm not yet sure how.
Honestly, given that your bank most likely is processing your data using AI/LLMs anyway (after all, credit scores were one of the first applications of "big data" and "machine intelligence", back when that was mostly logistic regression over a handful of data points), why should I not also reap the benefits of that?
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).
I’ve been asked to sign up to plaid by clients three times. Each time I’ve said no. I’m not giving a 3rd party access to my bank account. I don’t understand how people enable this total loss of friction for direct account egress. There needs to be friction.
Depending on the rate difference, I'd be tempted to setup a 'burner' checking account at a separate financial institution and just auto-transfer the loan amount from my primary bank to the burner every month.
Really? Both times I got a loan they wanted bank statements from all of my main accounts and verifiable income history, but they didn’t care that I was paying from an account that I had just opened for the specific purpose of paying the loan.
same. maybe it just depends on the bank, but i can't imagine why that would matter at all. they have the whole picture of your financial history, generally. what does it matter whether that one bank account has only enough in it to pay off the loan every month.
I'm not OP, but I assumed from their post that they meant the loan provider wanted Plaid access in order to perform underwriting - as in give us access to your account(s) so we can pull your banking history via an automated manner instead of sending PDFs.
Could be wrong though, as I never considered it'd be used for payments at all.
My bank's underwriter/loan officer actually said to get the best rate with them to specifically setup an account with them (They aren't my day to day bank) and just use it for my house payment. For the past decade the only transactions it has ever seen has been the direct deposit and the auto-withdraw for the mortgage.
Plaid requires your bank username and password, so they have full read-write access to your account. They can do anything you can do when logged in to the bank's website, and so can anyone else who gains access to Plaid's database.
Plaid's login flow also requires a 2FA code if your bank requires it. The same 2FA code that banks say to never provide to anyone else.
They're literally proxying the bank's login page just like a phishing site would, and I assume they're also selecting the "trust this computer" option so their access is more persistent. My bank does require re-2FA for larger transfers, but there's still a lot of damage I can do on a "trusted" computer without triggering another 2FA prompt.
Doing re-2FA for every outbound transfer, and mentioning the consequences of entering the 2FA code out of band (e.g. "enter code 123456 to confirm transfer of x$ to y" or "press OK to confirm transfer..." in a mobile app) should be the bare minimum these days.
Have you ever entered your routing+account number into HR software for direct deposit? Doesn't that qualify as handing a third party essentially the same access as Plaid gets? I think bank accounts are generally more accessible in the modern era, it's just a risk that you take.
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.
Plaid wants you to enter your bank username-password into their form. If it was just routing+account it would be truly no different than other bank connection methods.
Plaid works a lot like PSD2-based services in the EU then, which also typically consist of a form hosted by the service using Times New Roman and the original padlock.gif from Netscape asking for your IBAN and online banking password and then a TAN/2FA number. Obviously there are no technical controls at that point to what the service can do in your account. I tend to avoid anything PSD2 for much the same reasons as Plaid, it's extremely sketchy. Somehow we can have scoped access using OAuth for random webservices but for a credit check it's "please just give us your online banking login despite everyone telling you since 1995 that you're not supposed to hand that to anyone and always double check the URL in the address bar to be yourbank.com... we assure you nl-gwlogin.xs2a.openbankingservices.co.net is an entirely legitimate place to enter your PIN"
At this point, it's often OAuth, but in my view, the exact means of access is a red herring: The only thing that changes between screen scraping and OAuth is that Plaid doesn't get my banking password, which is literally the least of my concern compared to persistent access to my account transactional data.
With plaid they get access to all of your account numbers.
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.
Sure, but GP mentioned direct account egress which is why I brought up the typical method for doing that. I figured banks are already selling / reporting the other information (account types, amounts, transactions, etc.)
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)
routing+account numbers are not that sensitive. that's been API for how we transact money since pre-historic times.
plaid gets access to your online account with access personal data, security details, documents, transactions, statements, write-access etc.
Whenever I have seen the Plaid integration it will also ask permission to your transactions. HR software won't get those when I provide it my account & routing numbers.
The same info is also on checks, and there's an established story around fraud there -- if I didn't authorize an ACH withdrawal then my bank is legally required to make me whole. If I hand over my username+password to a third party, I'm on my own.
Also, the routing+account numbers just let them deposit/withdraw money, not snoop on all my transactions and harvest my data...
This is a common belief, but the CFPB has stated your bank is still legally required to make you whole in the event of fraud even if you handed over your username and password to a third party, and that any bank TOS stating otherwise are not valid. This is covered on the CFPB Electronic Fund Transfers FAQ, under the Error Resolution: Unauthorized EFTs, Question 8: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/compliance/compliance-resour...
In Germany, there was a similar antitrust-based ruling, but it even went further: They disallowed banks to block screen scraping services, as they considered the existence of screen-scraping-based confirmed instant bank transfers a valuable competitor to the (bank-led) card payment schemes.
In retrospect, they were maybe right on the competitive part, but the data privacy impact was disastrous.
Hijacking this comment to complain about fintech apps / saas providers requiring Plaid - please stop.
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.
Airbnb requested Plaid access to my entire Chase account and all transactional data to "verify my credit card" a few years ago, and wouldn't budge until I tried Apple Pay, where they apparently weren't able to figure out the underlying issuer and accordingly left me alone.
Needless to say that it was my last stay with Airbnb.
They do because their banks are largely not offering anything more fine grained, because they don’t have to, and in fact doing so would cannibalize their debit card business.
Requesting full account access for anything other than maybe budgeting software should just not be legal.
But what comes after? Can users decline or at least downgrade the level of access requested by whoever wants to peek into their bank account? Do banks clearly indicate (and periodically remind the user about!) all parties currently having access to their account?
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.
I was repeatedly pressured to hand my bank account logins over to plaid when I bought a house. People always seemed surprised when I refused. Maybe they were just acting that way to pressure me into making their sale process slightly easier, but I got the impression most people just go along with it.
Handing my finances over to a company like that is a hard no for me, I can't imagine ever doing business with someone who required it.
While openai's use of Plaid's spying on bank accounts is framed as a service it's real use case will be identification. Very few people if any will sign up to use this voluntarily. But it is a way to get users used to Plaid's spying and start slowly boiling the frog.
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.
It seems like every three years or so I need to use a tool with a plaid link feature, I try it, it gives some internal plaid error, then I find some other way of solving the issue.
Plaid is glitchy enough that whenever I hit a workflow that has no alternative, I just call the customer support line and tell them I get an error when trying to link my account via plaid, and they invariably have a manual way to do the thing on their end.
> OpenAI did this with your health data in January. Now it wants your financial data too.
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.
>they can see what political affiliation you have based on your campaign donations
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?
Okay, what concrete harms has Meta done with this information? At best you have some creeps using it to stalk their exes, which is bad, but a far cry from the AI takeover scenario implied by OP.
I haven't implied an AI takeover, this data will be repackaged into a product for military/intelligence, political applications, insurance companies that can charge you more because they know you're willing to pay, and many more.
These things already exist and happen, it's about the data getting better and not having to build tools to query it and make projections, since you can just type a query into a box even if you're not a data scientist.
>I haven't implied an AI takeover, this data will be repackaged into a product for military/intelligence, political applications, insurance companies that can charge you more because they know you're willing to pay, and many more.
Any evidence google or meta actually sells customer data like that?
They target toxic ads at people with poor mental health who are especially vulnerable. They do this intentionally because it's profitable.
There's plenty of reporting on this if you care to look it up. It "works" too. Spending more time on Meta products results in having more body issues, poor self esteem, and suicidal ideations.
But if I remember right you work for a big ad tech company and have previously gone to the mat to defend such practices, so I suspect you aren't genuinely asking.
Man, I remember when the common wisdom was that there would NEVER be enough people willing to put their credit card into a web browser to support a business.
Uh, debit cards are the worse as they (technically) don’t allow you to dispute charges like in a credit card. Money comes right out of your account first, and then you have to try to get it back.
> debit cards are the worse as they (technically) don’t allow you to dispute charges like in a credit card.
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.
I once had an issue where they drained the account (transactions weren’t blocked by the bank until the account didn’t have sufficient funds), and it took the bank a full month to investigate and refund.
That's unfortunate, and almost certainly a Regulation E violation on their side. They're supposed to provide a provisional credit within 10 business days.
You totally could, but the purpose of the OpenAI/Plaid integration is to help you analyze your spending and finances with OpenAI (using it as a budgeting/financial planning app), so if your spending isn't actually in the account you connected, it's not going to give you any value.
I'm not sure if Plaid still is- but when they first came out they were pretty evil. They would go into your accounts and download all activity. I spent many hours e-mailing them, trying to get a clear answer of what data they collect- and they never said no to anything.
Whenever I've been forced to use Plaid, I use a throw away "free-checking" bank account that has $1 in it.
Plaid is criticized because it’s a public-facing mechanism for third-party access into your finances, but many companies already have access without you knowing. In the US, many banks share nonpublic info such as transactions with retailers, marketers, government agencies, and others. They’re allowed to do so under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Report from the GOA:
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.
ernsheong | 11 hours ago
[OP] steveharing1 | 10 hours ago
righthand | 11 hours ago
hyperionultra | 11 hours ago
[OP] steveharing1 | 11 hours ago
reaperducer | 11 hours ago
"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.
parliament32 | 11 hours ago
Zenst | 11 hours ago
Reminds me of the underpant gnomes in many ways
Collect underpants ???AI??? Profit
JumpCrisscross | 11 hours ago
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.
warkdarrior | 11 hours ago
simianwords | 11 hours ago
cyanydeez | 11 hours ago
But yeah, can't have a systemic failure in the grift economy.
dude250711 | 11 hours ago
ReptileMan | 11 hours ago
frangonf | 11 hours ago
forinti | 11 hours ago
mcphage | 11 hours ago
nonethewiser | 11 hours ago
rprenger | 10 hours ago
lacy_tinpot | 10 hours ago
OpenAI is just a new-ish player.
ianm218 | 9 hours ago
I wouldn't want to share my financial data with OpenAI but for the average consumer the ship has sailed.
andy_ppp | 11 hours ago
lenerdenator | 11 hours ago
micromacrofoot | 11 hours ago
xiaoyu2006 | 10 hours ago
carlos-menezes | 11 hours ago
frb | 11 hours ago
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
BoneShard | 10 hours ago
frb | 11 hours ago
BUT there’s just things that nobody should be doing ever, like give it access to your production system or bank account.
cyanydeez | 11 hours ago
carlos-menezes | 11 hours ago
rvz | 11 hours ago
Nothing wrong about with giving them access to your bank or savings accounts /s
lxgr | 9 hours ago
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).
milesskorpen | 6 hours ago
binarymax | 11 hours ago
chao- | 11 hours ago
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.
njovin | 10 hours ago
lazide | 10 hours ago
el_benhameen | 10 hours ago
volkk | 10 hours ago
phil21 | 9 hours ago
Could be wrong though, as I never considered it'd be used for payments at all.
saratogacx | 10 hours ago
josephscott | 10 hours ago
lxgr | 10 hours ago
At least there is a process for unauthorized ACH debits. For this blatant breach of privacy, there is nothing.
robhlt | 9 hours ago
lxgr | 8 hours ago
Which is hopefully nothing beyond looking at transaction data without 2FA.
robhlt | 8 hours ago
They're literally proxying the bank's login page just like a phishing site would, and I assume they're also selecting the "trust this computer" option so their access is more persistent. My bank does require re-2FA for larger transfers, but there's still a lot of damage I can do on a "trusted" computer without triggering another 2FA prompt.
lxgr | 8 hours ago
Doing re-2FA for every outbound transfer, and mentioning the consequences of entering the 2FA code out of band (e.g. "enter code 123456 to confirm transfer of x$ to y" or "press OK to confirm transfer..." in a mobile app) should be the bare minimum these days.
hypeatei | 10 hours ago
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.
liveoneggs | 10 hours ago
whycombinetor | 10 hours ago
formerly_proven | 10 hours ago
lxgr | 9 hours ago
redserk | 10 hours ago
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.
hypeatei | 10 hours ago
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)
webo | 10 hours ago
buzer | 10 hours ago
lazide | 10 hours ago
lxgr | 10 hours ago
gavinsyancey | 10 hours ago
Also, the routing+account numbers just let them deposit/withdraw money, not snoop on all my transactions and harvest my data...
phoenixy1 | 9 hours ago
lxgr | 9 hours ago
In retrospect, they were maybe right on the competitive part, but the data privacy impact was disastrous.
webo | 10 hours ago
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
measurablefunc | 10 hours ago
webo | 10 hours ago
necubi | 10 hours ago
measurablefunc | 9 hours ago
alexr243 | 10 hours ago
measurablefunc | 9 hours ago
lxgr | 9 hours ago
Needless to say that it was my last stay with Airbnb.
lxgr | 10 hours ago
Requesting full account access for anything other than maybe budgeting software should just not be legal.
asah | 10 hours ago
lxgr | 9 hours ago
anakaine | 4 hours ago
wilg | 10 hours ago
lxgr | 10 hours ago
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.
rurp | 6 hours ago
Handing my finances over to a company like that is a hard no for me, I can't imagine ever doing business with someone who required it.
superkuh | 11 hours ago
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.
ReptileMan | 11 hours ago
drcode | 11 hours ago
Marsymars | 10 hours ago
cbg0 | 11 hours ago
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.
fontain | 11 hours ago
gruez | 11 hours ago
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?
kridsdale1 | 10 hours ago
gruez | 10 hours ago
cbg0 | 10 hours ago
These things already exist and happen, it's about the data getting better and not having to build tools to query it and make projections, since you can just type a query into a box even if you're not a data scientist.
gruez | 9 hours ago
Any evidence google or meta actually sells customer data like that?
rurp | 6 hours ago
There's plenty of reporting on this if you care to look it up. It "works" too. Spending more time on Meta products results in having more body issues, poor self esteem, and suicidal ideations.
But if I remember right you work for a big ad tech company and have previously gone to the mat to defend such practices, so I suspect you aren't genuinely asking.
rixed | 11 hours ago
arrosenberg | 10 hours ago
lxgr | 10 hours ago
The difference is that banking records are harder to falsify, so there’s that.
drcode | 11 hours ago
dfee | 11 hours ago
pesus | 11 hours ago
delis-thumbs-7e | 11 hours ago
This exactly the same shit Zuck did with Facebook. Hell with them all.
hirvi74 | 9 hours ago
cdrnsf | 10 hours ago
rfrey | 10 hours ago
I never expected to be nostalgic for those days.
xandrius | 10 hours ago
lazide | 10 hours ago
Don’t use debit cards online.
lxgr | 9 hours ago
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.
lazide | 6 hours ago
It’s not a trivial difference.
lxgr | 5 hours ago
lazide | 5 hours ago
It was very irritating!
lxgr | 9 hours ago
TheChaplain | 10 hours ago
If it needs to see transactions, just have your salary deposited there, then an automatic transfer the same day to your real account?
phoenixy1 | 9 hours ago
bubblegumcrisis | 10 hours ago
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.
quinncom | 10 hours ago
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-36
wilg | 10 hours ago
tintor | 9 hours ago
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.