FTC Probes Huge Financial Data Broker Yodlee

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sought investigative documents from huge financial data seller Envestnet. Envestnet, via a company it acquired called Yodlee, sells the bank and credit card transaction data of tens of millions of Americans to investment and research firms, which show how much people spent and where. From a report: "In February 2020, we received a civil investigative demand from the FTC for documents and information relating to our data collection, assembly, evaluation, sharing, correction and deletion practices," an Envestnet document, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in February, reads. On Wednesday, lawyers filed a class action lawsuit against Envestnet and Yodlee in the Northern District of California, seeking damages for Yodlee allegedly selling individuals' data without taking proper security protections and sharing the data in unencrypted files.

Re:

[bobby]

I agree and do use cash (mostly?) but there are cameras everywhere, especially stores and places you buy things, and facial recognition software, so who really knows at this point.

And license-plate reading cameras- stationary, on cop cars, etc.

And not to otherwise mention cell phone tracking. So you're being tracked a lot more than you probably realize.

Iwould like to ...

[Alain Williams]

get hold of Envestnet's directors' financial transactions and sell it to lots of people -- just see how they like it. In fact: the court ordering that this data be made publicly available should be part of the penalty imposed on Envestnet.

Re:

[chaffed]

Yodlee is like mint.com, people sign up for the service. What makes Yodlee worse is they run the backend for many bank's personal financial management (PFM) systems, aka account aggregation. For most, they do not know they are signing up for Yodlee to collect their data.

At least with Mint.com you know exactly what's going on.

I imagine most who sign up for their banks PFM service do not realize it's run by Yodlee. Customers are trusting the bank is doing the right thing. In a way, Yodlee is trading on the as

But the selling is fine..

[Mousit]

And of course, notice that the lawsuit is about how they aren't handling/selling the data the "right" way, not the fact that they're gathering and selling massive amounts of personal data in the first place, all without any say on the part of the person whose having their transaction information sold. That part's perfectly legal.

Business like this should not exist

[TuballoyThunder]

Defacto one-sided agreements are just wrong. While cash is awesome, it just isn't practical in far too many cases.

even worst...

[maybe111]

Envestnet, via a company it acquired called Yodlee, sells the bank and credit card transaction data of tens of millions of Americans to investment and research firms, which show how much people spent and where AND ON WHAT.