Episode 1208 • • 1:57:20 - 2:16:30
1208: Weeping Angels
Plaid Financial Middleware, Visa Acquisition and Data Scraping
Visa recently acquired Plaid, a financial middleware company, for $5 billion. Plaid acts as a bridge between banks and apps like Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase by using "screen scraping" technology, which requires users to provide their bank login credentials. This allows Plaid to emulate a user and access full transaction histories. The hosts warned that this creates a massive security vulnerability and a "murky" legal environment regarding data ownership and liability.