Android and iOS - One of the best apps called "Mint"
Is it safe to use it?
If is not safe then why?
Lets learn some about the apps "MINT"
The auto and preview of my personal status statemented.
Mint has been doing really great couple of passed year and many many user who followed and download the software to there tablet and smartphone (Doesn't matter which company you know)
Now it comes.
It's cloud base and must let access your personal bank, card, and debit.
Then mint will let you know all~ about what is going on with your bank and more more about your money.
Well, Mint said "It's total safe and secured.
Is it?
http://youtu.be/n5ceqT1fSJM
and here more
I’m not a security expert, but the research I’ve done makes me pretty comfortable in using the service.
The New York Times’ “Bucks” blog took a detailed look at Mint’s security features and explained the steps the site takes to protect your logins and passwords:
The account information is encrypted and stored on Mint.com’s own servers, which are located in an unmarked building. To get into the building, Mr. [Aaron] Patzer [of Mint] said, one needs to scan his or her hand, pass by a guard and then go through a long hallway where you’ll be trapped if there are suspicions about you.Inside, the servers are locked in a cage separated from other systems and constantly monitored. The only way to decrypt the user names and passwords from those servers, and to change the way the data is encrypted, is to use an encryption key that is broken up on five different smart cards carried by senior Mint.com executives, Mr. Patzer said.
It’s also worth noting that Mint doesn’t allow you to control any of your accounts from its site, just hoover up the information contained within them. So if someone were to crack into your Mint account (which would require only your username and password, not breaking into Mint’s secret HQ), they’d only be able to see how much was in your accounts, not transfer money or withdraw funds.
That said, the Bucks blog quotes another security expert who argues that giving your bank info to anyone just increases the risk of identity theft:
“There is no doubt that it probably is very secure but anytime that you provide your information to an additional entity, you are really compounding the opportunities for your personal information to be breached,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
USA Today financial columnist Matt Krantz says he thinks Mint is probably safe and notes its owner, Intuit, has a good history of taking security seriously. But Krantz notes if you’re uneasy sharing your financial data online, there are other options, like using an offline financial tool like Quicken.
For a more skeptical view of Mint’s security measures, you might want to take a look a this blog post by Jason Owens which looks at the site’s security features in a lot of detail, concluding the risk of someone accessing your bank information may be low but the risk of someone hacking into your personal Mint.com account may not be. Owens has also written a blog post on how he would go about hacking into a Mint.com account.
It’s a personal decision whether you feel safe using Mint or not. But my own gut feeling is that the risk is small compared to the benefits Mint provides.
What about you? What have your experiences been, positive and negative, using Mint.com? And would you feel safe handing over your banking details to it? Post a comment and let me know.
And Here are few more
and Finally
Should You Trust Mint.com?
By JENNIFER SARANOW SCHULTZ
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.
Mint.com has recognized that not all consumers are comfortable entering all of their bank information into its site.
In fact, partly in an effort to gain more users, Mint.com recently introduced a service aimed at helping consumers reach their long-term goals that doesn’t require the entering of any financial account information.
So should you trust Mint.com? For answers, we turned to Mint.com’s founder, consulted with identity theft and data privacy experts and found out what is going to happen to the sensitive financial data that customers have given Wesabe.
Aaron Patzer, from Mint.com, said the site protects user names and passwords with the same level of security as a financial institution. Specifically, none of that information is accessible on the site and no personal identifying information other than your e-mail is linked to your account, meaning someone who had your Mint.com log-in couldn’t access your bank account information.
Instead, the account information is encrypted and stored on Mint.com’s own servers, which are located in an unmarked building. To get into the building, Mr. Patzer said, one needs to scan his or her hand, pass by a guard and then go through a long hallway where you’ll be trapped if there are suspicions about you.
Inside, the servers are locked in a cage separated from other systems and constantly monitored. The only way to decrypt the user names and passwords from those servers, and to change the way the data is encrypted, is to use an encryption key that is broken up on five different smart cards carried by senior Mint.com executives, Mr. Patzer said.
On a quarterly basis, Mint.com also hires “white knights,” i.e. good hackers, to try and break into the system and so far, according to Mr. Patzer, “no one has been able to break into the core of our system where any sensitive financial information would be stored.”
How does that system stack up? Jay Foley, co-founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center, said he would trust the site. “Their security level is pretty decent, all things considered,” he said, noting it was in line with the standard at financial institutions but the information could still be encrypted at a higher level on par with that of the military.
Above all, however, he said what makes him trust the site is that it is owned by Intuit and has Intuit’s reputation behind it. “For them to make a boo-boo would be a serious, serious bad thing,” Mr. Foley said. “People would come at them.” He said he wouldn’t necessarily trust another money tracking site that didn’t have a big player like Intuit behind it.
The bigger risk than someone breaking into Mint.com’s servers and getting your information, he said, is someone at your bank leaving the information around in an easily obtainable area or someone breaking into your own computer and catching your bank user name and password as you enter into it into Mint.com. Mr. Foley said to avoid such a situation, make sure the security software on your computer is up to date, don’t use the same passwords for everything and don’t have your computer remember your financial institution passwords. “The bigger threat would be the security that you have on your personal home computer,” he said.
Still, not all experts feel the same way. “There is no doubt that it probably is very secure but anytime that you provide your information to an additional entity, you are really compounding the opportunities for your personal information to be breached,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
Since no site is ever 100 percent secure, Mr. Stephens said deciding whether to give out your information was really personal, related to how comfortable you would feel doing that. He personally doesn’t share his bank and brokerage account information with anyone but the institutions. “It’s an individual choice that you need to make;” he said, adding that “there is a trade off” between the benefits you get with aggregating your data and creating “the additional opportunity for your data to be breached.”
According to both experts, there have been cases of fraudulent users getting others’ account user names and passwords and using them to steal money from accounts. But neither was aware of any cases related to theft of information from services like Mint.com. (To be sure, it’s possible that even if such breaches occur, no one would know about them. While many states have laws in place requiring that consumers be notified of data breaches, sometimes companies themselves don’t know when breaches have occurred, Mr. Stephens said.)
You may also want to keep in mind that there may be issues of who is liable if someone somehow gets a hold of your account data from a site like Mint.com and uses it to log in to your account. Mr. Stephens said some financial institutions may require in their contracts with you that you keep your password private and don’t share it with anyone, meaning you could be on the hook for the lost money, though Mr. Stephens said he wasn’t aware of this being tested in courts. Mr. Foley, meanwhile, said he thought a site like Mint.com would ultimately be liable in a case like this since it promised to keep your data secure.
Finally, besides security issues, there are also privacy issues associated with using such sites. The sites are sitting on financial behavior information that would be extremely valuable in aggregate to marketers and others if they chose to sell it, an option Mr. Patzer of Mint.com has spoken about in the past.
Plus, even if a site promises now not to sell aggregate data about customers, it could change the agreement at any time and go ahead and sell the data. In addition, if such sites go bankrupt, even if they currently don’t sell data, trustees may decide to sell it to maximize the value of the assets.
The closing of Wesabe’s service may offer some hints of what would happen if Mint.com ever were to meet a similar fate. Mr. Hedlund said in an e-mail that the site had created its own hosting apparatus to store customer account user names and passwords. When it shuts down its service, Wesabe “will delete all copies of the data including all off site backups, and will destroy the hard drives on which that data was held,” Mr. Hedlund wrote.
In addition, customers have until July 31 to download any data they want to keep from Wesabe (instructions on how to do that are here) and then the site will delete all data and passwords, including backups. In addition, Mr. Hedlund wrote that Wesabe will not sell users’ data or passwords to anyone “nor have we ever done so.” The community discussion part of the site will remain open and Wesabe is planning to open source some parts of its software so people can use it on their own computer if they want to.
It would be up to those who use the open source option to keep their passwords and data secure on their own machines. “I would not recommend anyone use the open source version unless they feel confident in their ability to do that. This option is basically for people who are already programmers,” Mr. Hedlund wrote, noting that still, “someone could decide to contribute code to make it usable for others if they wanted to.”
After reading this post, do you, or would you, trust Mint.com with your account information? Why or why not?
Must have password lock for your Mint apps.
And must lock your phone with password.
Smartphones are getting very PC like.
Therefore Please use this apps or which and what so every apps choice is your and take care if you have them.
Good luck~ and have nice day~!!
