Topic: Quicken, Microsoft Money (now dead), others? Who can you trust?

Unless someone has some teeth in the game, how can you trust someone's OFX program to not be a spywhere?  If Quicken or Money stole your bank account information when using it, there is someone who will be accountable (what I mean by teeth in the game).  If anyone who's developing a module to help others download their financial information, well unless that is audited and shown to not be a spywhere  or a hacker stealing information...

THEN DON'T USE IT... that's my suggestion/recommendation.

Thoughts?  Am I wrong to think this way?

Has anyone audited any of the tools out there without source?  I will not run someone's financial programs unless I've reviewed the source code.  Minus Quicken and Money at this point.

Re: Quicken, Microsoft Money (now dead), others? Who can you trust?

That is a very legitimate concern.  I am highly skeptical of finance programs as well.  As much as  I would like to use mint.com I will not use a site that automatically grabs my financial info.  Especially one that lives on the internet!

Another secondary worry is that the programs author might unintentionally do something dangerous with your information.  I know how easy it is for even highly experienced software developers to make critical mistakes.

I had plans to open source the ofxget program on this website but I never got around to it.  I think it's time that I finally get around to it.

Re: Quicken, Microsoft Money (now dead), others? Who can you trust?

Jesse- sounds good.  You'll notice that I provided a JAVA example.  I think if you open source it with instructions how people can build it, it will get used.  Also, the version I put up there could be made to take command line parameters and it could then be used to download and deposit a file on the user's local machine.  Such a simple solution could be used on MAC/PC.  Great website!

Re: Quicken, Microsoft Money (now dead), others? Who can you trust?

Thanks that will be very helpful.  I'm not a java programmer.  Ofxget was my first java program, in fact.

Re: Quicken, Microsoft Money (now dead), others? Who can you trust?

Not sure if it's appropriate, but KMyMoney (personal finance app for KDE, but works under other window managers, and also ported to Mac and Windows) is fully open source, and imports OFX files.  With plugins (also open source, but I'm less certain of the details) it will also download through direct OFX connection to the institution.

Jack