Let's start with the harsh, terrifying shit.

Mint and other personal finance websites have shown that 35 million users are willing to link their accounts to budgeting services.

Yes. I am linking a email address I solely use for Mint to a single bank account. In fact the name Mint calls me is NOT the name on my bank account. And Mint is fine with that. I trust Mint with my account because its going to break down the amount I spend and put it in pretty graphs. That provides real value to me. Literally - that helps me save money. I give you access to my money account so that I can save money. Yes.

Further, as far as I know, Mint never asked for my Facebook and doesn't know my age or gender or education history or employment history or mother's name or birthday or amount of friends I have. I'm sure there are algorithms they could use to figure all this out based on my spending but it's not asking me to provide those things. It's not telling me to combine ALL that information so they can do stuff with it.

So what we’re doing is Netflix-ing or Spotify-ing

And netflix and spotify work because they are apps where I also do one thing: I watch movies or play music. It then takes that anonymous data about millions of users and use it to recommend movies or watch music. See - we're all still dealing with a single thing.

Further, Spotify doesn't promote itself as music personalization. Netflix doesn't market itself as movie personalization. Both are giving consumers access to "all the music" and "all the movies" for a monthly fee. It gives people recommendations as an additional bonus. But the personalization is more behind the scenes. The thought "oh, Spotify is going to track all the songs I listen to so that it can improve it's recommendations" never crosses my mind.

The bet we are making is that people will be willing to link their account for personalized recommendations and recognition to merchants.

Schreeeeech. What this app is doing it taking where I spend money so it can tell me where to eat. Those are two very separate areas of my life. I expect Google to track my searches. I expect Spotify to track my music listening. I do NOT expect my bank to track the songs I listen to. Nor do I expect Spotify to track my budgeting habits. And this is going to be the major problem with this app.

I am aware of privacy, I am aware of the invasions. I am fully fucking aware I am not in ANY SENSE OF THE WORD hard to track. I make a lot of choices that allow me to get value in return for giving up privacy. I'm also a bit lazy. But there's still no way that I'm ever going to give my bank account information to any company in return for a 3-way invasion of privacy so that I can get restaurant - or any other personalized- recommendations. There is no real value there.

Let's not forget that THIS APP IS GIVING MY SPENDING INFORMATION TO THE PLACES I EAT SO THAT THEY CAN ALSO TRACK ME. Then it's also giving every other motherfucking restaurant or person in this world this data, indirectly and anonymized, hopefully. Mint doesn't give my information to others or use it to tell others how to budget based on my information. It simply throws a list of numbers into a graph and when that graph hits $200/month on eating out, an ad automatically displays "HEY YOU SHOULD GET THE BOFA CARD THAT GIVES YOU 5% BACK WHEN YOU EAT OUT!" I ignore those.

If I were to know that Mint was giving my information to BofA every time that happened, there's no way I would be using that app. If I knew Mint was taking all my spending habits, comparing them to other people in my demographic / location / music tastes and then using that to do more stuff with, I would be hesitant to use Mint anymore. And, again, Mint is literally helping me save money. It's not promising to tell me that it knows the food I like.

So - it's not all bad.

This is where the future is going, whether I like it or not. People are more and more willing to give up information in return for personalized results. The difference is in the marketing. Google is probably one of the most invasive companies on Earth right now and even those who realize the full extent of it's power, don't care enough to force real changes. Every time Google knows what I am really trying to search for, I remind myself that at least I don't have an Android phone, too.

This app would probably be wildly successful if launched in 4-5 years. It would probably be wildly successful if it didn't want bank account information. There needs to be something to alleviate any privacy & tracking concerns.

At the very least, statements like:

Transaction data is valuable to consumers, merchants, and third parties like small business entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out the best places to start their businesses. It’s valuable to a local commercial bank trying to understand the demand for certain categories of business like a restaurant, and also to government for being able to measure and inform economic policy."

and

We will provide them with a macro level map of economic activity in Ann Arbor so they can make smarter decisions. We’ll say, “Here are our patterns, and when people come to Main Street this is typically the type of thing they will do or spend on a restaurant or an entertainment venue.”

should never come out of his mouth. That makes me terrified. You have my bank account and now your are partnering with the government (sorry - "economic dev group")?! Are you kidding me?! If this was Google, or Facebook, or Yelp, or Mint and that came out of the CEO / CMO's mouth, it would be an absolutely shitstorm - PR nightmare.

There is a reason businesses are considered B2B or B2C. When you fall in the middle, you have overlapping goals with major differences in target demographics. Then both the consumer and the businesses become hesitant and you lose out on both. If a business promotes itself as B2C, but is internally selling and making most of it's money on B2B services, that can work. But your branding and marketing is never going to work doing both.

Angie's List is a good example of a service that appears to be B2C but is actually working very hard behind the scenes to obtain and sell to businesses. I only know this because a client, a small business owner, got sold to. It is a valuable service for her because she can see reviews left by people and leave her own comments in response to negative reviews. But you don't see that information on their website - it only comes in email or phone calls.

“Every time a platinum customer comes into my store, send them a push notification telling them to show this message to the host to get priority seating.”

This is a strong point of the app. That is providing real value to customers. But, right now, this is just another feature or added benefit of the app. In my opinion, an app that solely allowed people to get perks at restaurants they visit most is a much stronger idea. It might be worth considering a plan that begins as a perks app and grows to allow messages between merchant and customer, or grows to add recommendations based on your transaction history, or grows to add public reviews that are verified by transaction.

Their goals are strong. Some of the things they want to do are nobel. The possibilities with this app are strong. But the creators seem to be completely oblivious to the very valid privacy concerns that people are going to have. The fact that they are oblivious is even more terrifying because it shows that they aren't focused on protecting my privacy. The only thing worse than being secretly tracked is being not-so-secretly tracked by a company that doesn't take the necessary steps to ensure my data is anonymized, my data is secure, and my data isn't freely given to random, or not so random, people / government / businesses. There is a reason Google stands up and shouts and thumps it's chest every time the government gets called out for invading privacy. Google can do the same exact shit, but they are careful not to show it, purposefully market it as a feature, or let people besides Google have access to it.