[HN Gopher] Why Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile Want to Access Your B...
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Why Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile Want to Access Your Bank Account
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-08-30 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| With the number of breaches T-Mobile has had (as mentioned in the
| article,) there's no reason to trust a company like that any more
| personal information than strictly necessary. If they were to to
| and corner people in to giving more, it sounds like a good reason
| to stop doing business with them.
| JEDI-HACKER wrote:
| [dead]
| tomtai wrote:
| This title feels misleading somehow. I was expecting some sort of
| access that let them see your transactions like an open banking
| affordability check or to get spending habit data...but it's just
| a direct debit?
|
| News came out today that MasterCard and Visa are upping their CC
| fees so the reasoning from the carriers makes sense. If anything
| it's good they're passing the saving on?
| modus__ponens wrote:
| https://archive.is/dAO6o
| FrameworkFred wrote:
| ha, you got me...never-ending captcha
| vlod wrote:
| What is going on with these constant captcha's? I'm human but
| can't seem to read stuff nowadays.
|
| Anyone debug this?
| unknown_user_84 wrote:
| I haven't, but https://archive.ph/ still works for me.
|
| Getting infinite CAPTCHA on .is and .today.
|
| *EDIT Noticed this yesterday, probably going on for more
| than that. Makes me wonder if this is the twilight of the
| project. From what I heard in internet rumor that was
| always kind of the expectation from the person running the
| thing.
|
| I did a look around to see if there are any services that
| duplicate the functionality but I didn't find anything
| terribly compelling.
| bb88 wrote:
| I'm wondering if this might be a side effect of CGNAT.
| Stuffing a bunch of people into one or two ip addresses
| means you're sharing the IP with potentially other
| abusers.
|
| And to think IPv6 has been around 20 years now....
| unknown_user_84 wrote:
| Good theory. I wonder if that is some of it. Though I've
| got a dedicated IP from my local co-op ISP and I'm pretty
| sure I haven't done anything offensive. The issues from
| other users makes me really wonder if this is the death
| throws of archive.* and how in the world am I going to
| read all these newspapers I don't want to pay for now.
| bb88 wrote:
| From my experience certain IP addresses are now less
| privileged than other IP addresses.
|
| It worked for me up until I changed my ISP. Captchas
| usually use the IP address to determine how difficult to
| make the challenge. Abusive ip ranges get worse
| experiences than others.
| supertrope wrote:
| Are you using Firefox? I've noticed certain website
| operators show lots of CAPTCHAs if you have tracking
| protection turned on, you're not logged in to a Google
| Account, or you've deleted your cookies.
| vlod wrote:
| I tried using Firefox and Chrome (while logged into
| gmail).
| willcipriano wrote:
| "Like others in the industry, we are making this change in
| response to credit-card fees,"
| Arrath wrote:
| What is driving the increases in fees from the credit card
| companies?
|
| Greed? Using the fees to fund ever more enticing rewards
| programs to attract customers?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| What are you going to do, NOT accept card payments?
|
| The sky high rates in the US is because fuck you, deal
| with it. It's pretty explicitly wealth transfer from poor
| people to credit card companies, with a small kickback to
| well off credit card users to make it popular and hard to
| regulate.
| tracker1 wrote:
| You don't have to be well off to not buy more than you
| can afford. That said, I'd be perfectly fine if CCs
| disappeared altogether, and limited people to only debit
| accounts.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Probably a combination of Greed, cost disease, and risk-
| free rates rising?
| jondwillis wrote:
| Currently I am using prepaid debit cards (I'm sure it will only
| be a short time until this is prevented) to pay my T-mobile bill.
| kccqzy wrote:
| A lot of credit cards offer something like "lost phone
| protection" whereby you get reimbursed if you lost your phone,
| but only when you pay the phone bill using that credit card. Such
| insurance must be expensive and I suppose that's why fees are
| increasing.
| isykt wrote:
| > About 85% of American consumers with bank accounts are
| comfortable making recurring payments using those accounts, said
| John Anderson. He is head of product at Plaid, a fintech company
| that links vendors with customers' bank accounts.
|
| Plaid, who got sued for abusing their access to people's bank
| info. Fuck that guy.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| I, frankly, do not understand why Plaid doesn't work more like
| Privacy.com. If a company _must_ have the ridiculous stance
| that they need to access my bank account, and Plaid is linking
| them together, why can 't Plaid have a popup saying, "Company X
| will access your Bank account. Company X may not withdraw, at
| any time, more than $25 or <fill in the blank amount here>
| without your consent on a monthly basis. You may need to fill
| this form again if you ever purchase or subscribe to anything
| requiring greater amounts of money transferred. < OK > < Cancel
| >"
|
| Someone might say, "that would make Plaid require a money
| transmitter license" or something similar. I would argue, why
| should Plaid _not_ need a money transmitter license for
| literally handling bank account login information?
| morninglight wrote:
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/why-your-wir...
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > Wireless carriers want to give you a monthly discount. You
| just have to pay them with your bank account.
|
| Not quite. The notice I got from T-mobile was that my bill
| would go up by $5 unless I handed over my bank account info for
| the direct charge.
| alarsama wrote:
| It is not clear in the article who will keep debit cards as
| accepted forms of payment. At least for mobile providers who will
| still offer debit for payment in the future, you do not have to
| provide your bank account number. Though you do lose out on
| credit card benefits like points/rewards and the ease of
| disputing charges.
|
| For those whose mobile providers will switch to only using bank
| account numbers for payments and want the ability to be able to
| block access to the account if that account number is somehow
| compromised, I would recommend looking into Qube Money [1]. Among
| many other awesome functions (like being a great budgeting tool),
| it allows you to create different "Qubes" (pronounced "cubes",
| think digital cash envelope) that you place money in and allocate
| towards different bills. It's similar to Privacy and Capital
| One's virtual credit cards in that each Qube is assigned a unique
| debit card number. More importantly, each Qube gets its own bank
| account number. Closing a Qube and opening a new Qube with a new
| bank account number is easy. There are more great features, but I
| figure this was most relevant to the topic.
|
| [1] https://qubemoney.com/
| ryaneager wrote:
| I second the Qube recommendation. After Simple died I was
| looking for a good replacement, Qube more then fits the bill
| and even has features I wish Simple did.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Because that's where the money is.
| Zandikar wrote:
| This is one thing that privacy.com is great for. If it weren't
| for these companies no-credit card requirement, you could also
| use something like Capital Ones virtual credit card, and those
| aren't the only two offering such services.
|
| Privacy's is especially good imo as you can set spending limits
| and easily (un)pause cards and create new ones pretty easily.
| Even outside of trying to take advantage of auto-pay discounts,
| it's just a nice piece of mind to be able to be a hard check on
| an accounting "Oopsie", mine or theres.
|
| That said, not a fan of this overreach and general disregard for
| people's money. Yes, most people are terrible at managing their
| money, but hidden fees, auto pay not auto happening on the
| scheduled date, and general corporate greed, disrespect and
| distrust certainly doesn't help either.
| supertrope wrote:
| It's a balance. Individuals want to insulate themselves against
| businesses charging the wrong amount or even committing fraud.
| Businesses are trying to minimize losses due to customers who
| fail to pay their bill. Hence the use of credit checks,
| security deposits, prepaying for service, requiring a card or
| bank account to be linked at all times(1), etc.
|
| (1) I used to use Google Fi. There's simply no option to
| receive a paper bill or to pay via check.
| jen20 wrote:
| It might be a balance, but the doublespeak makes me have a
| strict rule these days: if I can't pay via Apple Pay, you
| don't get my business.
| byteknight wrote:
| I love the native integration with 1Pass
| proamdev123 wrote:
| I'm interested in using privacy.com, but I'm concerned that
| providing THEM access access to my accounts creates even more
| vulnerability.
|
| Fo they have any security protections that prevent them from
| draining my accounts (either accidentally or via hacker)?
| fourg wrote:
| You could create a new checking account with your same bank
| that you give privacy.com access to and keep a low balance
| on. Still involves making sure it has enough to cover your
| privacy.com virtual card expenses.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Privacy cards don't qualify for the debit card discount with
| T-Mobile. I suspect it's the same for all the ISPs.
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(page generated 2023-08-30 23:02 UTC)