[milesskorpen]

The class action was settled — which just means it was cheaper to settle than to fight in court, not that there was wrong doing. This kind of thing is very very common, and the settlement amount was modest in the scheme of class action settlements.

Plaid is pretty clear in their privacy policy that they DO NOT repackage and resell data (they do sell data - as in, when you use Plaid to give your banking info to a mortgage broker, the broker is paying Plaid for your data, but it is at your explicit request).

If banks didn't want Plaid to do screen scraping, they could build APIs. Some are now. But they've been VERY VERY reluctant to do so, because they want to hold customers (us!) hostage to their services and make it painful to go anywhere else to get financial services. I appreciate that Plaid figured out how to break their stranglehold, which has directly enabled the current blossoming of FinTech apps ... even if they had to do so in a way I don't love.

[sangnoir]

> If banks didn't want Plaid to do screen scraping, they could build APIs.

Even if we take this as a given - what if customers don't want Plaid to scrape their data? I only used Plaid to verify that I own the bank account - but they went out of their way to scrape my transaction information, just because they could, and that data is valuable - that is messed up. I'm sure if my bank had an API, Plaid would still have hoovered up my transaction information, so the "API access vs Scraping" debate is a sideshow.

If they hadn't scraped my transaction information, I wouldn't have been part of the class, but they chose to maximize data collection. If it had been Facebook or Google that harvested financial info the way Plaid did, no one would be saying "Their TOS is clear about it". Additionally, any big tech company can purchase Plaid and get that data (I can't remember if the settlement has a provision for deletion of that data).

[geraldwhen]

Not really. APIs cost money to develop, and people, and time. And many large banks don’t have robust engineering teams that can tackle new challenges or support a public api.

Small projects as you might imagine are measured in years, not days or months.

An API like you describe could take half a decade to build, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. These are not fake numbers or estimates. This is what it would cost.

When you think big finance, think government.

[jjeaff]

I think you will rarely see a class action settlement for a complaint with zero merit. Otherwise, you would be getting a tiny class action check in your mailbox every week for every company that prefers to settle rather than fight.

Do you also believe that Bill O'Reilly and Fox News paid out $30m+ even though he didn't do anything? After all, they admitted no wrong doing in the settlements.