Privacy policy - what personal information does Quicken share with affiliates or other 3rd parties?

roulette

I picked Quicken classic over Mint or other online services assuming I can fully control who gets to see my data (personal financial information specifically). However, when after reviewing your privacy policy I feel my assumption may be incorrect. Can someone clarify this for me.

Per the privacy policy outlined here - quicken.com/privacy/us

1. Personal information includes: Account information, Identity verification information, Financial information, Payment information, Information about your billers, etc.
2. Personal information may be shared
   We may share your personal information with:
   1. Affiliates. Our corporate parent, subsidiaries, and affiliates, for purposes consistent with this Privacy Statement
   2. Service providers. Companies and individuals that provide services on our behalf or help us operate our services or our business (such as hosting, information technology, customer support, security and fraud prevention, payment processors, email delivery, website analytics, identify verification, marketing and data enrichment services)
   3. Authorities and others. Law enforcement, government authorities, and private parties, as we believe in good faith to be necessary or appropriate for the compliance and protection purposes described above.
   4. Advertising partners. Third party advertising companies that may collect information on our website through cookies and other technologies, or jointly offer products and services that we believe you might be interested in.
   5. Professional advisors. Professional advisors, such as lawyers, auditors, bankers and insurers, where necessary in the course of the professional services that they render to us.
   6. Parties you authorize. Third parties you access through our products and services.

It's not clear to me why my personal information is shared with the highlighted parties above. Can anyone explain this to me? In my case the primary driver to spend more and use a local/desktop version of the software is to maintain privacy.

Secondly, it was my understanding that in the desktop version (when you disable mobile/web access) the data is local to the computer disk. Is this accurate? If yes, Quicken shouldn't have access to any of my financial information in its servers. Unless its caching / replicating the data when syncing with financial institutions.

Thank you

jacobs

Yes, your data file lives on your desktop. How much data Quicken gets its hand on depends on several factors. If you enable syncing with Quicken's cloud services, in order to use the companion mobile app or web interface, then all your data is uploaded/synced to Quicken's cloud servers. If you leave Sync turned off, then your data is just on your desktop. If you connect financial accounts for downloading, then in most cases your data flows through Quicken's aggregation servers. If your financial institution offers Direct Connect, then your data flows directly from the bank to your computer. Or if you enter your transactions manually, then Quicken never sees them.

roulette

Thank you @jacobs couple of follow-up questions

1. How can I tell is if an institution supports direct connect? I tried adding, WellsFargo, Chase, Bank of America and few more, I only see the Intuit option. Is there someway to force Direct Connect when both methods are supported?
   
2. Sharing data with Affiliates, Advertisers and Professional advisors without explicit authorization sounds excessive. I can understand free services like Mint resolving to this approach to generate revenue, but here we are paying customers and our personal information should remain private. Note: I have this mobile/web option disabled, but I plan to use the connection feature to download transactions.

Jon

@roulette When adding an account, when you get to the screen where you provide your login credentials, press the Advanced button and you will be able to choose between Direct Connect and Quicken Connect if both options are available. If only one of them is available the other one will be greyed out & not selectable.

jacobs

@roulette I posted a screen shot of the screen @Jon mentions where you can select a connection method, or at least see what is available, in your other thread.

Sharing data with Affiliates, Advertisers and Professional advisors without explicit authorization sounds excessive. I can understand free services like Mint resolving to this approach to generate revenue, but here we are paying customers and our personal information should remain private. 

As I wrote in the other thread, we all evaluate security risks and data privacy issues differently. I feel like so much of my data, like every account I have and have ever had, is widely available elsewhere, so it really doesn't concern me what Quicken or Intuit gleans for marketing purposes.

Quicken's business model is their business model, so you either have to come to a place where you're okay with it, or seek some other alternative. But my feeling is that pretty much any service/platform/software which goes through an aggregator to download your financial transaction data is going to be more or less the same.

Chris_QPW

Here is the thing, lawyers write their policies to be as broad as possible so that no matter what they do they won't get in trouble.

Just because it is in there, doesn't mean they are doing it. But it also doesn't mean they aren't or won't do it in the future.

And they aren't going to tell us exactly what they are doing.

And they certainly are not going to change whatever their policy is at the moment because you don't think it is fair/right.

As @jacobs said, you have to decide for yourself if it is worth it to you or not.

smayer97

How can I tell is if an institution supports direct connect? I tried adding, WellsFargo, Chase, Bank of America and few more, I only see the Intuit
option. Is there someway to force Direct Connect when both methods are supported?

Aside, from pulling up each FI in Quicken and checking the options, you can look inside the FIDIR.txt file within QMac for the word "DIRECT" for each FI that supports Direct Connect, or you can look in the online version of the file here: https://ofx-prod-filist.intuit.com/qm2400/data/fidir.txt

Within QMac, you can choose whatever connection type is available.