It is particularly sad how common scenarios this are for users, especially in the US. I have known how terrible applications like Plaid (and alternatives) were, but at various points have been required to use them to do something like pay my rent (this is also a very common theme in my life: I strongly dislike a certain company or app, but find myself required to use them regardless, even knowing that my usage and information will be abused).

Giving my full credentials and my security question answer in plaintext to a third party in order to 'link my bank accounts', and then having them scrape every bit of information they can from my personal banking statements and sell it is... nothing short of a nightmare scenario, from many standpoints (user security, user privacy, user education, anti-phishing, and so on).

I guess it's nice to see this class-action lawsuit, but that it amounts to an average of $0.60 per affected user is, well, not particularly inspiring with respect to my hope that things will ever get better here.

Plaid is used by many industry leaders including Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase. When it's not used, usually a similar alternative is. Perhaps the most frustrating part of this is that placing blame on these companies is difficult, as there's no interoperability or open banking APIs that can be used as an alternative.