Decisions About Data
January 30, 2009 – 6:37 pmA fascinating article just published at TechCrunch outlines consumer spending using data from mint.com
I’m experimenting with Mint and I have extensive experience using Quicken, and am impressed with how much better mint seems compared to the equivalent Intuit effort (Quicken Beam)
It’s useful to note how Mint has achieved an end run around an incumbent. Intuit is too dependent on sales of their packaged software and have a hard time launching free online apps that cannibalize their sales.
Anyway, the interesting question is the choice Mint made to publish (sell?) their anonymized data. I can imagine sitting in the CEO chair and facing the choice of whether to publish this, risking the ire of the user base, or keep it private. At ClickTracks when faced with a similar choice we decided to keep the data private. We made it a feature that the customers data belongs to them. That looks like the wrong choice with something like Mint, even though the data is more sensitive.
The world has changed a lot in the past 5 years, and it looks like users are perfectly OK with their anonymous, aggregated data being published.
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