On 6/19/20 9:38 AM, John Ralls wrote:
The actual OAUTH implementation begins with 
https://cdn.plaid.com/link/v2/stable/link-initialize.js. I don't really have 
time ATM to reformat and study it, but it supports my initial suspicion that 
they're setting up a man-in-the-middle to obtain an OAUTH token to monitor the 
user's bank account. I wouldn't be comfortable permitting a third party that 
kind of access, and I'll bet that very few of plaid's customers disclose to 
their users that that's what's going on.


Yes, that's also my understanding. They store the tokens, which actually give them and anybody who would hack them full read access to your account (the tokens do not allow anything else than reading)

It's also apparent that server.py is intended as example code and that plaid 
customers would probably write their own, likely in php running on their web 
servers. It's very simple and could be easily ported to C++ or Scheme. Since it 
appears so far to be a one-time setup step it could live in an assistant that 
would use a webkitgtkwebview for the user to authenticate with the bank. The 
other half of the implementation would live in gnucash/import-export/plaid and 
handle the plaid API interaction and converting the json response into the 
transactions to present to the matcher. A bit of a project.


Yes, I concur with you. Server.py is just an example. But integrating all this in GC would be a bit of a project, but I can't seen any serious roadblock.

Documentation would have to include strong warnings and disclaimers about the 
third-party involvement and links to plaid's documentation and terms of use as 
well as to the registration page.

Plaid's terms of use are at https://plaid.com/legal/. I don't see anything in 
the Developer TOU that would preclude GnuCash providing the facility outlined 
above; it would be incumbent on every user to obtain the developer credentials 
just like they do for Alphavantage.

Regards,
John Ralls

The *main* issue for me is that you can't get investment data. The free account access only provide transactions for regular bank accounts. So I'm really not sure it's worth the effort to integrate this in GC, honestly.
Jean
_______________________________________________
gnucash-devel mailing list
gnucash-devel@gnucash.org
https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel

Reply via email to