Allison here.? The use of finance apps on smartphones and tablets is ever increasing. These apps offer tools to help users with everything from budgeting to bill paying to financial planning. Many people love using apps to aggregate all of their spending in one location and quickly create detailed run-downs of purchases and goals. Personal finance apps do have many benefits, but they also carry an identity theft risk.? The Wall Street Journal wrote a great blog about this topic.
In order to pull together your financial information from a variety of accounts, these apps often need personal banking information like user names and passwords. This information is used by the app to access accounts and create reports. Most of the time apps only compile your information and don?t allow you to access your accounts directly.
App companies claim that they have high level security in place and that the risk of sharing passwords is very slim. Privacy advocates on the other hand worry that sharing this information is a huge privacy risk. If your account was breached thieves could potentially gain access to all of your banking user names and passwords as well as your financial history. Even if hackers aren?t able to access your banking accounts directly, they may be able to use social engineering and your banking details to access your accounts. Even simple mistakes within a company could lead to your account information being compromised.
If you think mistakes aren?t possible, think again. In 2009 a company known as Rudder, a financial account aggregator, accidentally emailed personal banking information about users to other users. Read more about it here. The company apologized for their mistake and shut down in 2010, but mistakes aren?t unheard of and could potentially happen to you.
Whether or not you decide to share your banking information in exchange for convenience is up to you, but it is important to know the risks and keep an eye on your credit reports no matter what you choose.
Source: https://www.allclearid.com/blog/personal-finance-apps-id-theft
the descendants the descendants homeland homeland packers giants game golden globe winners 2012 ricky gervais golden globes
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.