quicken 2005 privacy question

Absolutely. Quicken at setup ask for your name, address and SSN. Then each account you setup, it records the account numbers, bank routing numbers and userid/password associated with the account and/or credit card. This is then matched up with records from a credit reporting agency to obtain your home address.

All this information is used in several ways.

1. Intuit has a handly little side-line in selling this information to direct marketers that target certain demographic groups. So if a marketer wants to target all 40+ men that are moderately computer-savvy, have a 0/month spending habit on "electronics", Quicken can provide this information in a snap. That is why we old-timers suggest that you never use the Quicken pre-defined categories. At least if you make up your own categories, they can't classify you so easily. But don't be surprised if that occasionally gets you spurious offers in the mail - only recently I got a special VIP card in the mail from Victoria's Secret, thanking me for my good partonage over the years. This despite my never having shopped there. I'm pretty sure it was because Intuit misreported my spending to them

1. Intuit keeps this information as a "honey-pot" to lure would-be spammers and hackers. They have not updated the defenses on these systems since the late 1980s and it gets hacked regularly. gangs like the Chinese Triads use the Intuit honeypots as an entry-level schooling for their gang member initiation. So don't be surprised if you find that you occasionally rent a hotel room and a couple of hookers in a seedy part of China.

2. Finally some of the staffers at Intuit occasionally, on slow days, go through the information and have a jolly old time seeing how some people spend their money.

It has also been known that if payday is a little long in coming, the odd person has helped themselves by borrowing a credit card or bank account number to tide them over a llittle spending crunch.

All this is just the price we pay for convenience in banking. Because there are so many of us, the actual price per individual is very low and we tolerate it - something like the herd instinct; while some animals in the herd may be caught by predators, the bulk of the herd escape and flourish.

And don't get me started on the amount of loan offers, mortgage offers and credit card offers that directly originate from Intuit and its lackeys because they know that you have some of these and might be in the market for a better rate.

Intuit has been successful in defending itself against these abuses in several high-profile court-cases in the late '70s and has ever since been left alone to perpetrate these vicious practices on a captive community. You could say that we are just regarded as a source of profit and corporate excesses by Intuit.

The fact that they sell the software is a sham - they barely cover the cost of writing it, and the only enhancements they bring out is in ever-more refined methods to capture and intercept our private and personal data.

But I've ranted enough for now, I see the nurse with my medication coming down the hall.