A friend recently mentioned to me that he was considering using Mint.com but was worried whether he should trust the site with his bank account information.
To take advantage of Mint.com’s money tracking services, you need to enter your bank account user names and passwords so Mint.com can keep track of how much you’re spending and saving. This raises the question of how safe sharing that data is and how easy it may be for someone to get that information from Mint.com and then use it to log into your accounts and swipe out your money.
There’s also the question of what would happen to that data if the site were ever to close, which is the fate of at least one rival site. A Mint.com competitor, Wesabe, announced late last week that it was shutting down its similar budget tracking service as of July 31. “We were able to keep the business going for seven months after exhausting our venture backing, but did not get to profitability and made the decision to stop pursuing the business,” Marc Hedlund, Wesabe chief executive officer, wrote to Bucks in an e-mail message.
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