I call my credit card supplier to make a payment over the phone. This is because other payment methods are a shitshow¹. The robot says it will record my voice and use it for verification purposes. I’m not okay with that so I press buttons until a human comes on. I order the payment to draw from a checking acct. Then the operator transferred me a bot that said “state your name to confirm this payment”. Now what? I was trapped.
I wonder if this is something I should be giving a shit about. My data is routinely exfiltrated by criminals. I’m not sure if voice prints are being stolen in that way or how they might be used. Perhaps voice print is even more secure for the consumer. If the voiceprint cannot be used to create a voice, only to verify it, then a voice print may even be less useful for criminals than security questions. Any thoughts on this?
¹ (billpay is outsourced likely to a privacy abuser; will not do autopay because I want control [the purpose of privacy]; mailing a paper check is best for privacy but cannot be bothered for various reasons).
You can have your bank mail a paper check, I’ve been doing this since the 90’s.
If they can do an electronic transfer, they will, after the initial check.
This used to be called Electronic Bill Pay. It’s amazing how many people are unaware of it. It just uses the exact same system they’re already using to transfer the funds, it’s just done under your direction.
I was doing this until everything started being paid 2-3 weeks late with Wells Fargo.
I know Wells Fargo is a shitshow but I banked 100% online until my wife wanted to get a joint checking account with them.
Ever since Simple went under I haven’t found a reliable bank with fast ACH (like ONE Finance until it sold out to Walmart), bill pay (like shitshow Wells Fargo) and multiple checking accounts (you can on Betterment but they give you just one debit card that can take an hour to reassign).
FFS I just want a decent bank.
There are over 6000 banks and credit unions in the US. And all 6k of them miraculously manage to be shit. I don’t get it. You would think out of that many choices there would be one non-shit option.
Though to be fair credit unions only give the illusion of independent and small. They actually all outsource to other giant corps, so it amounts to fewer choices than it appears.
None of them have a complete feature set.
I’ve been toying with the idea of creating my own finance app that would act as a money manager. Essentially it would move my money around so I don’t have to stress out about bills and such on payday.
I’m at a point where I almost want to create a super fancy open-source banking web application for someone with the resources to open a bank to steal. Each bank that comes along, however great the feature set makes everything proprietary then gets sold out and the codebase seems to be nuked.
I covered this in my footnote. Billpay services are free for a reason. Whatever that reason is, I don’t trust it. Banks themselves do not do the billpay service in house. They outsource it. Which means an outside 3rd party is getting that sensitive info and providing a service for free. Fuck that. I would rather buy stamps. (but I don’t do paper checks either for complex reasons)
You’re not wrong, but the average person is going to do their typical “you’re too paranoid” routine against this.