RSS Feeds
Manage Your Money with Wesabe Dashboard Widget
Posted by Kyle Pott at 9:00 AM on December 3, 2007
Mac OS X only: Previously introduced money management web app, Wesabe, makes it even easier to manage your money with a free dashboard widget. The widget has two views: transactions and accounts. The accounts view (shown above) displays the balance of each account. The transactions view (not shown) displays the most recent 10 transactions. The dashboard widget makes it very easy and convenient to manage your finances at-a-glance. The Wesabe dashboard widget is a free download for Mac OS X only.
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
Duncan
Posted December 17, 2007 1:57 PM
Since this has popped up on the Australian edition of Lifehacker, it seems pertinent to ask whether it works with Australian bank accounts and credit cards? Does anyone have any experience of using it here in Aus?
haimtime
Posted 9:56 PM 2/12/07
This cries security risk. Is the transaction going through SSL. Is the account information being stored on the the server? Is there a privacy policy?
I know I'm being a pain, but these are serious concerns
haimtime
marcwesabe
Posted 11:09 PM 2/12/07
Hi, haimtime,
(I'm one of the founders of Wesabe.) You're not being a pain at all -- those are completely legitimate questions.
The Wesabe Dashboard Widget does use SSL for all connections. It also stores its credentials (your Wesabe password, not your bank password) in Keychain on Mac (so it is encrypted by your login password).
Wesabe does not take bank or credit card credentials on our servers, and we do not have account numbers for those accounts, either. We provide a separate downloadable application, the Wesabe Uploader (available for Windows and Mac, and as a Firefox plugin for all platforms), which keeps your bank and credit card credentials on your own machine. The Uploader strips your account numbers out of your data before uploading that data to Wesabe.
Also, the information that is stored at Wesabe is kept separate from your identity -- only your Wesabe password, which we do not have, links them.
We have what we refer to as the Wesabe "Data Bill of Rights" that lists the promises we make about how we treat your data. The first of those rights is that you can export and/or delete your data from our servers at any time. The full document is here:
[www.wesabe.com]
A lot of companies will tell you, "yeah, we're secure" but will not follow through with letting you back out if you decide you are uncomfortable, and we feel that making that promise ensures that we have to meet the highest standards -- otherwise people can and will leave.
I hope this helps -- I agree that your questions are completely valid, and we've taken as many steps as we can think of to make sure (1) that your data is secure and (2) that you have complete control over your data and how it is used.
Marc Hedlund
Wesabe
marcwesabe
alexander
Posted 1:10 AM 3/12/07
I have been doing research about these online finance managers and no one has yet answered this question: Banks have something on their legal mumble-jumble that specify that they will not protect you if you give your login information to someone else, do sites like mint and wesabe fall under that "someone else" category? If wesabe's data is breached and that leads to someone messing with my accounts, will the bank still protect me if they determine the breach was wesabe's fault?
alexander
NeoteriX
Posted 11:04 AM 3/12/07
@alexander:
Marc will have to back me up on this/verify, but as I understand it, your question is headed off by the elegant and deliberate design of Wesabe. Even if there was a catastrophic breach of Wesabe--in other words, someone went to Wesabe HQ and held a gun to Marc Hedlund's head, asking for the keys to the cookie jar, he wouldn't be able to get very much useful information.
The exact technical details are beyond me, but when I was reading it on the website and presentation papers, it seemed to make sense to me; As I understand it, the information and personal data are stored separately and encrypted.
NeoteriX
haimtime
Posted 1:17 PM 3/12/07
Wow, you guys actually read and respond. I will look into it as an option.
haimtime
online_money
Posted 6:46 AM 3/12/07
It is better to do some extra work and save yourself from insecurity, then having the luxury for any new piece of software or widget, which claims to make your life easier.
online_money
marcwesabe
Posted 6:11 PM 3/12/07
Hey,
@alexander, I'm not sure how banks would respond in the case that you pose. However, let me say again that Wesabe does not have access to anyone's bank or credit card passwords. The client software we provide, the Wesabe Uploader, runs on your own computer and downloads your data directly from the your bank or credit card site, and strips out your account numbers. This is the same model that Quicken and Microsoft Money have been using for years, so I think that it introduces no new risks that the banks would need to identify.
@neoterix, thanks much for the comment. You're right in your description. If anyone is interested in reading about the Privacy Wall technique we use, we described our approach extensively in the article here:
[blog.wesabe.com]
Hope this helps. Thanks much for all the interest -- we've gotten great feedback from Lifehacker readers all day, and we really appreciate you all taking the time to check Wesabe out.
Marc Hedlund
Wesabe
marcwesabe