Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Mint | Refreshing Money Management
Mint looks awesome, but would you trust it? I really want to sign up, but it is turning over a lot of information to one place, and I worry about the ability of companies to protect data long term on the web. On the other hand, the benefits are considerable. What would you do?
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4 comments:
What are your specific concerns?
Have you read Mint's privacy policy? http://www.mint.com/safe.html
On the other hand, check out their indemnification clause.
http://mint.com/terms.html#a-17
My major concern would be storing my banking and credit card passwords on a single web site.
The trust factor for a site like this needs to be extremely high, as there is a clear difference between having a privacy policy and actually adhering to it. I would imagine that many of the companies that have had well-publicized data breaches in the past had strong privacy policies. How well were they adhered to?
If someone has a bank account or credit card that is compromised, their exposure is hopefully limited to one account. If consolidated Mint data is compromised, then one's entire financial life is an open book. I think it is very cool that there are palm scanners to keep people out of the secure data room. That is absolutely terrific, unless secure palm guy is the one skipping out with your money.
Could I be off base? Sure, it might be entirely safe. But I think that as a consumer it is probably healthy to maintain a degree of skepticism regarding turning over so much personal info to one place until it is proven safe, and I would not think that my perspective is atypical.
Last, I don't exactly find this reassuring -
"Mint specifically reserves the right to transfer Registration and Account Information to a third party in connection with a Transfer. Should such a Transfer occur, we will use our best efforts to require that the new combined entity follow this privacy and security policy with respect to your personal information, as and to the extent required by applicable law and require that you receive prior notice if your personal information could be used contrary to this policy."
I'm not a great person to voice an opinion on this. After all my identity theft last year, I don't even THINK about putting ANY of my information online. I hesitate to shop online simply because my cc#s are then out there (I still shop online, only now I think about it, heh). We don't do any banking online, so we definitely won't even be looking at this. I guess if I were comfortable enough for my bank to have my info online, then I'd consider it, but I'm just not there.
ay carumba, that looks like a bad idea.
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