To be able to accept credit card payment for my freelancing work, I signed up for an invoicing/payments platform.
To get the funds from those customer payments into my personal bank account, this service asked me to provide my bank account's username and password "to verify".
After doing so (after first changing my bank account password to something temporary, of course), I watched the screen show:
"Verifying ..." "Verifying ... ..." "Verifying ... ... ..."
There was 30 seconds of this, 45 seconds, .. 60 seconds, and I'm now really regretting my temporary moment of weakness. What was I thinking? Those bastards are sucking the data on every bank transaction I've had over the past several years.
Who are these people? I don't know them. What are they going to do with all my bank history data? I check ... their privacy policy indeed says they pull in my bank transaction history.
Every. single. transaction.
To make things worse, the service they use to suck my bank data, Plaid, says:
We may collect, use, and share information we collect in an aggregated or de-identified manner (that does not identify you personally) for any purpose permitted under applicable law.
Oh, great ... so now I just voluntary gave my "de-identified" financial transaction data to anyone and everyone willing to pay for it, including those who certainly can "re-identify" it with minimal effort.
I feel so violated.
[Update: this is obscene].
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