Really?
http://skrooge.org/ http://www.gnucash.org/ http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/ ...
Here we speak of an open source alternative to Mint, not to Money :-)
I understand that the question really means "give you credentials to Facebook", where Facebook is proxy to any big company. This is a harder question, but one that I face often in practice, giving out bank account info, SSID number, credit card numbers, etc. The answer, evidently (since I and millions of other people do give this information out) is yes. The above answer still applies, these companies still stand to lose more than me if this information leaks or they mismanage it.
In summary, the richer and visible an entity (real or corporate) is the better I feel about providing sensitive information, if it should be provided. This means that teh sort of main message used here ("would you give your account info to") is irrelevant. Being open source is a huge step up, but for the general public either it doesn't mean much or else is a detriment, since the thinking is that, if it's open, "hackers" can also see the code and find ways to exploit it.
So how can a small startup ever compete with large established companies, since this creates a chicken and egg problem?
There is a (small) niche of people that care about this stuff. But I can't help but feel that we, as hackers, try to communicate why others should care. Perhaps they should, I don't know. But what I do know is that they don't.
We end up wasting precious time and energy trying to convince someone who blatantly trusts Facebook that they should not. And we use phrases like "a company that's business is to sell your data".
I agree completely with you and after having worked at a large company (Yahoo!) on their security team I can confidently say that your data is safer with a large company than on some small or even self hosted software.
I'm not trying to convince hackers not to hack. I'm saying to not waste time convincing the general population. Scratch your itch and find the niche that actually cares about what you're building and talk their language.
The problem is that he will have an always more accurate profile of you. Your incomes/expenses tell a lot about you, some info that interest a lot of people...
The consequence is that FB will sell your always more accurate profile (or give it to the NSA :-)
I agree with the idea of a free/open finance manager - definitely when it connects to the bank through online services.
I wrote a GPL'd finance app for OS X a few years ago, and tried to add online banking support, but other than OFX HTTP download, there didn't seem to be any standard specification for it at the time other than screen-scraping, which I don't think counts, so I didn't bother, given it would be different for each bank.
Another issue is that my bank would give abbreviated/limited names and descriptions of the data, which meant that there needed to be a "post import" step to tidy the data up to make it meaningful which was annoying.
I don't know what the state of things is now...
http://wrapbootstrap.com/preview/WB0XLB528
ArE yOuR eYeS oVeRsTimUlAteD YET YET YETYET YET ETYET EYTYETYYETYYET???
oh wait... before that... do you trust your own bank? Sometimes I have my doubts.
Last I looked GnuCash didn't support any online banking except HCBI (Germany). So beyond the simple online finance manager functions, maybe it would be worth thinking of re-purposing this as a banking transaction aggregator that could feed GnuCash or Ledger or whatever. That would give it a better focus on the value for me, at least.
What I would really like to see is a startup or open source project that can sell banks on a standard API with granular OAUTH and drive that difficult adoption cycle. Something in the spirit of the German HCBI, but built on REST with the ability to limit an app's access to read-only, get balance and get transaction options.
I think this sentence is poorly written. I'd replace "of which" with "whose" and "user's" with "users'".
There was a good article a couple of years back about why Wesabe lost to Mint[1], written by one of the Wesabe co-founders. The biggest issue according to him was that they chose to write their own integrations instead of partnering with Yodlee.
Since that time, Mint has left the Yodlee platform, but it gave them a first-mover advantage that no one has been able to overcome.
It does squick me out to share my credentials and grant full access to my bank account, but I was hoping for some smart transaction categorization. Wave does a pretty good job there.
I'm still likely to just disconnect and reset all of my passwords though. It's just too worrisome leaving that out there.
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