[akarma]

Thank you for the response — I know you're likely very restricted in what you can say here, but:

You just settled a claim that you sold customer transaction histories, and from the article linked, the plaintiffs' lawyers claim that you have agreed to implement meaningful business practice changes to remediate these issues.

(1) If you've never sold transaction histories, why settle a lawsuit alleging that you sold transaction histories?

(2) What meaningful business practice changes could you be making if there's no issue to begin with?

(I'm relying on the article here as a source of truth).

[jeandenis]

You’re right that I can’t write much (legal, PR team say hello).

The bottom line point is, we don’t sell data and that’s not the main allegation. The main allegation is that people didn’t understand that we were part of the flow of connecting banks to apps. We disagree.

Before 2017, there was a whitelabel experience of Plaid that didn’t say “Plaid”, didn’t have the Plaid logo, etc. We still stand by our belief that our disclosures at the time were more than adequate. But it’s not something we want to have protracted litigation around.

The reality is that our experience today is vastly different (and has been for a while). As for “what meaningful business practice changes could you be making if there's no issue to begin with.” Like most companies, we’re always making improvements to our experience -- today we have a consent pane that makes our role clear, a portal for people to manage their data, etc.

[akarma]

> Plaid would retain access to their credentials and use them to mine, aggregate and then sell users’ financial transaction data to third parties (including to the fintech apps that use its services) for purposes unrelated to the plaintiffs’ use of the fintech payment apps. [1]

This is allegedly from the lawsuit. I can see your perspective — that it made sense to settle because of the privacy accusation, but you still deny the other accusations. I understand that perspective, though as I'm sure you can understand, it's hard to know for sure based on the allegations and the settlement.

[1] https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2021/05/11/plaid-federal-e...

[thallium205]

Pre-2017 Plaid was awesome. You were able to just feed in a username and password of a bank account you collected with your own UI and it would spit out its transactions.

[archenary]

IANAL and have no affiliations to Plaid. My takeaway from the article and [0] is that Plaid violated privacy laws because they provided insufficient disclosure with respect to the collected data, not that they are selling data to third parties.

Edit: Update [0] to source

[0] https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2021/05/11/plaid-federal-e...

[akarma]

(IANAL either) I understand and agree that part of the issue is that they, allegedly, underhandedly collected this data. My question is focused around the potential selling of that data, which took place according to the lawsuit and was likely the reason to collect the data.

From the article you linked:

> Plaid would retain access to their credentials and use them to mine, aggregate and then sell users’ financial transaction data to third parties (including to the fintech apps that use its services) for purposes unrelated to the plaintiffs’ use of the fintech payment apps.