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.

So I read the article, and I downloaded the app, and I'm not going to log in, and I'm not going to sign up with facebook, and I'm not gonna play. Here's why:

1) The app advertises itself as a recommendation engine. Yet it wants my bank account. And only a few different banks. If it's using my financial data to link up to businesses, it should take a quickbooks file, but it doesn't wanna play.

2) It really seems to want my facebook data. Even if I knew the developer personally, I really want exactly zero links between Facebook and my bank account.

3) Before it's shown me anything it asks three times for my location. I don't even know what the app does.

4) When I do "take a tour" it seems like it mostly wants to tell me how much money I have in my bank account. Thanks, I know that. I'm not sure what that has to do with finding a decent fish taco.

5) No aspect of the article, the website or what I can see of the app gives me any real explanation about how I benefit from using it. Here's as close as I get: you’ll not only be able to track how you've been spending recently, and going forward, but also exactly how much you've spent at your favorite merchants. We tie your transactions back to real places, and aggregate your purchases over time, so you see just how much you’ve racked up at your local Starbucks. Yeah, I can do that with "ctrl-F starbucks" in Quickbooks.

Now, granted - I'm pushing the ragged edge of that "40-up" demographic that your friend doesn't care about. But it's paragraphs like this:

We think that we would be uniquely valuable to the conversation about the future and planning of cities. We are, for example, doing a project with a local economic development group in Ann Arbor. 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.”

Hey. I downloaded your app. You're asking me for my Facebook login and my bank account data. Aren't you even a tiny little bit interested in giving me something?

It's a moot point anyway - I'm with a credit union. It'll be the 12th of never before they'll give Wisely access to their data. So I couldn't use the app even if I wanted to.

I will give a more detailed response later - out at the mo - but, harsh or not, insomniasexx and kleinbl00 are making very valid points, though I'm sure I'll have my two cents to throw in the ring when I can. Insom in particular points out the monetization of transaction data, which some particularly hysterical user on either here or reddit had insisted banks were already somehow doing - without the logic & application behind this app. (I highly doubt your banks are monetizing your transactions at this point. But with the introduction of apps like this I bet you they will begin to try - IF they can get the cost/benefits to scale. Big if. The CFPB would also probably clamp down on such activities like a motherfucker - but that can only happen when such activities become widespread and known.)

I'll also raise right away that some of the objections made against yelp - that it's unverifiable - aren't valid. You can check in to a location on yelp which validates you were there; you can post photos of your meal which is pretty valid evidence unless you really are such a sad sucker you are faking photos for fake reviews on yelp. (The question then becomes: why? Why would the effort of such deception be worth it? When being paranoid/conspiracy theorist, I find it always good to ask why covert activities would be worth the imagined or perceived actions. Also: paranoia is, in many ways, twisted arrogance.)

I'd say that with an article in Forbes your friend is doing pretty well for himself though; there's got to be plenty of buzz. However I trust yelp enough. So what if there's a single fake review on yelp? I'm confident most are real. I need a recommendation for dinner? Well, what kind of cuisine do I feel like tonight? I'll search it in yelp and go from there, or just search top rated restaurants.

This strikes me as similar to Angie's list except less practical. And more easy to successfully monetize.

Unlike many app developers, these guys are undoubtedly going to profit from their customers. I read that social media and similar sites' product is user data, and the problem is these sites are still figuring out who wants to know that Richard Nixon is one of my "inspirational people" on Facebook and how that's worth money. These guys are smartly capitalizing on their users. They are probably very smart and clever. I think they could take their smarts and clever and build a more useful app that consumers would want to use more and would cause more people to actually seriously consider letting the app "in" to the level that they want their app to get "in."

Have you guys heard of waze? Now that's a cool crowd sourcing app.