No, No & No.
After all that has happened with all the World wide financial skulduggery that Banks and related businesses have been getting up to over the last who knows how many years and you are thinking seriously about giving some online company that is only two years old all your banking details....
Trust is something that is earnt not given away to some tinpot outfit to save an hour or so a month.
It's pretty obviously everyone is highly confused about what information you're actually giving Mint, because you haven't actually used the service. Everyone is under the impression that you must be filling out forms with every bit of personally identifiable information about you and possibly DNA samples. That just isn't the case.
Here's what Mint
does not have:
1. Your name
2. Your address
3. Anything that actually would identify who you really are other than a random username and password
4. Any of your actual full account numbers to any financial institution (unless yours is stupid enough to use your account number as a login).
Here's what Mint
does have:
1. Usernames and passwords used to access your various online banking accounts
"Yes, but doesn't that sound really
really bad?" -- it does, until you think about what it actually means in practice. It's the same as someone being able to log into your online bank account or credit card. What can they actually do from there? For
me, that means they know what banks / credit cards I use, can see my balances, see my recent transactions and possibly steal $1,000 via transfer (the maximum online transfer my bank allows) -- which I would promptly get back. Being able to access your account online, in most cases, is pretty limiting, which is intentional, because real fraud does happen.
What they still don't have:
1. My name
2. My address
3. My full account numbers (because these are never fully displayed by any reputable financial institution online)
4. Any real identifiable information about me other than my spending habits and account balances
5. My credit card CVV numbers
No one is stealing my identity or wiring off my life savings to Switzerland as someone else implied. They have nothing about me that even remotely allows that.
You don't have to give Mint any information you don't want to. For example, my retirement accounts are not in Mint, nor are my savings accounts. No reason to be. I only have my daily checking account and a couple credit cards to track spending habits and balances in a central location.
Maybe I'm just a bit too trusting in this case, but I really don't see what the super paranoid concern is once you review what's really at stake. And I'm generally highly skeptical and non-trusting, especially online where practically everything is a scam. I'm not saying you don't have to be sensible and blindly throw some outfit everything about you. That'd be insanity, but really, Mint has less information and is far harder to crack than someone cracking and packet sniffing my wireless network which the majority of you use wireless as well. There's a lot more online and in my daily life to worry about other than Mint.
