[cosinetau]

"and you hereby appoint Penny as your true and lawful attorney-in-fact and agent, with full power of substitution and resubstitution, for you and in your name, place and stead, in any and all capacities, to access third party internet sites, servers or documents, retrieve information, and use your accounts, passwords, and other information"

Lol, no.

[hardwaresofton]

I think this might (should?) be standard phrasing for any app that accesses another company's API on your behalf...

We may not think of it this way, but this seems like correct legalese for any sort of assistant app, whether it takes your username and password, or you give it an API key.

[dontmitch]

That was our understanding too.

One thing to clarify: it's just me and one other guy (imalex) working on this, although we're hoping to hire another person soon. We're not trying to screw anyone over with the privacy policy. We just don't know anything about legalese, so we relied on existing terminology.

[hardwaresofton]

Congratulations on shipping! I wouldn't worry about complaints like this too much, it kind of happens a bunch on hn.

Have you studied what mint and personal capital are doing right/wrong? Just wanted to say a word of caution as I've heard of different banks making life hard for mint.

[tcfunk]

AFAIK they won't experience the same issues as Mint until they achieve a similar userbase size. The complaints from the banks was the server load that Mint was putting on them for information they felt users potentially weren't using.

[toomuchtodo]

So silly. They should've just provided Mint with a dedicated endpoint on a dedicated server or two in their colo. Load problem solved.

[cosinetau]

I hope my comment didn't make for sour feelings. I'm positive your team is working in good faith (more legalease!) and I'm cheering on for Penny's success.

While that may be standard language in a ToS, I can't waive that broadly written right.

[pjc50]

And does it come with any indemnity for error, or does it make it completely legal for the company to wire your money to the Bahamas and run off with it?

[hardwaresofton]

I have no idea, but it's definitely your perogative to make sure it doesn't (even though many of us will not).

Also even if that stuff wasn't explicitly written into the agreement, as long as it wasn't excluded, that's kind of what you pay good lawyers for. I highly doubt a reasonable judge is going to rule on the side of the fraudsters without such a clause -- pretty sure it falls under the purview of "good faith".

[oneeyedpigeon]

This. BTW, is anyone aware of a legalese parser and translator? Because I think it would be a hit.

[dvcc]

There is https://tldrlegal.com/, although it is manual work rather than automated.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Yeah, that's a great service, but I think something automated would solve the scaling problem. It feels like a much easier problem to solve than general-purpose natural language processing because - my impression is that - so much legalese is stock phrases and boilerplate. Even something that would tell me what "true and lawful attorney-in-fact" would be a start! IANAL, obviously.