I shop online, trade stocks, reserve airline tickets, and bank online but the day I give up all my personal financial information to a company that I know nothing about is the day someone needs to unplug my router from the cable connection.
TechCrunch recently gave a $50,000 cash award to a company called Mint for its online personal financial software which basically keeps track of all your bank accounts, credit card accounts, pays bills online etc etc. I'm glad the software is easy to use, works well and the whole site is very Web 2.0 ish, but put all my financial information on a web site that is owned by a company that is not an authorized financial institution? Are you kidding me? Give them access to my online bank accounts? Say what? If you give up your bank pin# to a 3rd party, you are voiding the agreement you have with your bank. Mint has a lovely privacy policy on their site which isn't worth squat to your bank if some of your money goes astray. I'm sure they are very honest folks at Mint but they aren't getting 1 byte of information from me because on the Internet, shift happens-as in your money shifting to where it shouldn't.
I'll make this short and sweet. DON'T USE THIS OR ANY OTHER WEB APPLICATION LIKE IT. Keep it on your own computer on an application that cannot be accessed by anyone but yourself or someone you trust with your money.
I can't believe many boomers are going to sign up for this service. We've been around too long to know the possible downside of such ventures. 
Does that include places like Walmart (in store)? They ask for the number in their machines. We stopped doing that some time ago but a lot of people believe they should still give it to them. We use a debit card as a credit card and duck that little deal.
Posted by: Jaz | September 25, 2007 at 02:52 PM