alt Hacker NewsMy PC has had a scanner connected to it for over 20 years, and in the mid 00s I was scanning and depositing checks through my bank's website (USAA). Even with modern cameras and fancy smarphone software, the results you get from a PC scan are still much better than taking a picture with your phone.
If you don't have a scanner, nearly all laptops have a webcam built in, and many people have one for their desktop as well.
On top of all that, there's no reason you can't use your smartphone camera to upload an image into a website through the mobile browser. I've done it many times for things. Just this morning I "scanned" a receipt into Ramp by taking a picture with my smartphone in the mobile browser.
You can't invade the user's privacy nearly as well in a browser (which is great for analytics/marketing), so there's a lot of incentive to the app creator to force a mobile app. But I think we should be honest that it's not for the user, it's for the company.
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> the results you get from a PC scan are still much better than taking a picture with your phone.
The quality of the check images is not as big of a deal as you might think. No one is actually inspecting these unless the amount of deposit is near a limit or the account is flagged for suspicious activity. You definitely do not want to throw away the physical copy until the bank confirms the deposit.
> My PC has had a scanner connected to it for over 20 years
You're basically the only person in America doing this. Tens of millions of folks are just scanning it with the app on their phone and it's objectively a much better experience lol. The resolution of the photo taken on your smartphone is beyond good enough, there's no need to over-engineer something here.
> You can't invade the user's privacy nearly as well in a browser (which is great for analytics/marketing), so there's a lot of incentive to the app creator to force a mobile app. But I think we should be honest that it's not for the user, it's for the company.
I agree with your first sentence, but not your second one.
Banking applications can certainly get more/different data on you from using the app, but the job of the bank is to protect money and to know their customer. Privacy is secondary, of course outside of things like other people knowing your account balance, unauthorized access, &c. That's for the bank, because they don't want to lose your money, but it's also for you because you don't want other people getting access to your money.