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Comment by rlvesco7 | Hacker News Reader

Do we think that services like Mint are handing over all our financial data to the government (making it easy for them to have a picture of your entire finances)?

If so, are there any viable, offline alternatives?

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Never mind Mint, if your bank accounts are in the US your financial data is already available for inspection by the IRS, DHS, and probably many other three letter agencies. I'd wager that Mint, not being a bank, has far less an obligation to hand over your financial data than the banks you have accounts with.

The US already has complete financial surveillance over all US financial activity that isn't a cash trade, and they've been expanding it around the globe aggressively. For decades.

In this day and age where everyone does everything through credit cards, everyone already has all your financial data. Certainly the government does, and the credit card companies hand information out like candy.

Probably. They also scoop up all your credit card transactions, so for in-person purchases, they've got your location logged there as well.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/wsj-nsa-progra...

For what it's worth, I'm working on a Mint competitor of sorts (that takes advantage of Machine Learning to automatically help you save. It will be based in Australia, not the US, and the basic app will be released as open source for personal self hosting.

That sounds good. I'd be interested in seeing the open source version

This is interesting. Machine learning requires data. Will the app be sending back up anonymized data that then gets used to help the app make better decisions? Or how else will you make your app smart like Mint? Can't wait to see what you're doing.

The former is what we are doing, but coupling it with some basic statistical financial methods (and some stuff I've come up with myself!) that you can rely on if you'd rather not send the information. That's also what the cheapest plan for our hosted version relies on.

The entire premise is personal finance software that learns your habits to make it easier to use :)

After reading rlvesco7's comment, I immediately deleted my Mint account. It always made me uncomfortable to have all my financial data sitting in the cloud. I stopped actively using it a few months ago.

An open source service sounds interesting, but I don't think I'll ever be willing to post all my financial data to a web service again. It would be great to have a locally installed application that could keep track of all those accounts. Having some algorithms run to help me save would be great, but it would take some demonstrated assurances to get me to provide even anonymous data for the machine learning process.

I don't think any country is safe at this point. TNO (trust no one) is the only solution. Your cloud provider should have no ability to hand over your data because they can't decrypt it themselves. For example, Lastpass has an architecture where the passwords are encrypted and decrypted on the client, the server never sees anything but pseudorandom noise, and you can audit their browser addon to verify this. You can, with careful design, build many - if not most - cloud services in this way.

That is exactly what we are trying to do. The problem is that is somewhat at odds with machine learning in practice, but I have some ideas in the space.

Just an FYI, a Mint competitor, Wesabe, went out of business some time ago. When they did, they open sourced their software. Not sure of the state it's in. Maybe you can find some good things in their bank interface/scraping code...

https://github.com/wesabe/pfc

Brilliant! Thanks for that :)

If you like text files, there's ledger : http://ledger-cli.org/

The government having access to your financial data is a prerequisite for a functioning tax system. If you are audited, the IRS has the right to look inside your bank accounts.

The policies (or location) of online budgeting tools are entirely irrelevant. Hiding financial data from the government involves well established trades dating to long before the internet (or PRISM): money laundering and tax evasion.

Check out GNUCash. I've been using it for about a year. Entering all your stuff is tedious, but it's open source and integrates with some banks (also import from Quicken and CSV).

I could never sign up for Mint. I see the value in it, but providing a private business with a view into all my financial accounts just seems like a huge mistake.

Other than banks, creditors, and credit-score companies? I imagine there are far more businesses with access to view our financial accounts than we realize day-to-day.

I'm sure you're correct.

But as far as I know, my bank can't look at my accounts that are with other financial companies.

It's not just that, but they use information in your accounts to recommend other companies' products. Today I got a notification that I was paying more than average for car insurance, with a link to a competing product.

text files, paper statements and your file cabinet. There are various open source check register and book keeping packages. GnuCash is complete but possibly overkill for some people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_softwa...

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