17 votes

Mint: Late-stage adversarial interoperability demonstrates what we had (and what we lost)

2 comments

  1. skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    To head off the banks' countermeasures, Untangly [Mint's spinoff company] maintained a bank of cable-modems and servers running "headless" versions of Internet Explorer (a headless browser is one that runs only in computer memory, without drawing the actual browser window onscreen) and they throttled the rate at which the scripted interactions on these browsers ran, in order to make it harder for the banks to determine which of its users were Mint scrapers acting on behalf of its customers and which ones were the flesh-and-blood customers running their own browsers on their own behalf.

    [...]

    Some banks sent Mint legal threats, demanding that they cease-and-desist from scraping customer data. When this happened, Mint would roll out its "nuclear option"—an error message displayed to every bank customer affected by these demands informing them that their bank was the reason they could no longer access their own financial data. These error messages would also include contact details for the relevant decision-makers and customer-service reps at the banks. Even the most belligerent bank's resolve weakened in the face of calls from furious customers who wanted to use Mint to manage their own data.

    2 votes
  2. Omnicrola
    Link
    Related: I used Mint's tax filing tool last year for the first time, it was pretty easy to use (and free!).

    Related: I used Mint's tax filing tool last year for the first time, it was pretty easy to use (and free!).

    1 vote