alt Hacker NewsOpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid
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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.
> 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.
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.
I guess birds of a feather flock together.
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.
I’m generally positive towards AI and LLMs..
BUT there’s just things that nobody should be doing ever, like give it access to your production system or bank account.
People will pay for OpenAI to have access to their financial data??
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.
Reminds me of the underpant gnomes in many ways
Collect underpants ???AI??? Profit
This extends the attack surface area for ChatGPT.
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.
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.
I never expected to be nostalgic for those days.
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.
This tread's been incredibly insightful. I'm speechless as to the dystopian things which are happening throughout the world, which seemingly receive no friction whatsoever :/
Stupid question, but what if you just open an account at a credit union, then have that one connected to plaid?
If it needs to see transactions, just have your salary deposited there, then an automatic transfer the same day to your real account?
Kim Jong-il approves!
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?
Why don’t you just ask for my blood? I can bottle it and send it over for Sama to drink for breakfast.
This exactly the same shit Zuck did with Facebook. Hell with them all.
What's the local version of this? What's the best way to pull in my finance data locally, without clicking through to each portal? (USA)
Unrelated to Plaid, openai use stripe for payment and it is a real pain in the ass. For example, when you travel in Asia and needs to use your card to pay for your account, that is European, the transaction will go on to be accepted by the bank and Stripe reject it in the last step if you don't use a local credit card.
The comments here do seem to ignore that rocketmoney exists, and that many people use 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.
Lovely! It's probably inevitable this will fuck over people eventually. Sam may as well prepare his next blog post ahead of time.
Only if it helps me buy more stock in GameStop
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.
Sounds great! Everyone in these comments seems to be so out of touch with what people want out of computing.
Today's edition of "What could possibly go wrong" presents ...
The only better idea would be a Robinhood integration.
“Let the bodies hit the floor!”
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That feels like the natural choice. I’m sure they could claim they’re more advanced by building their own integrations but I prefer that they use Plaid since I know it as a trusted entity.
I used to use copilot.money which was a nice app. Nowadays though using a GUI is fairly tedious so I’d rather use an assistant but I want mostly personal cash flow and net worth visualization, and transaction review and this isn’t going to do it I think.