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18 years ago when working for a shipping company a lot of customers complained about the pain of setting up an address book again, so to help our salespeople entice them to give us their business I wrote some code so if you entered the username and password for one of the other companies it navigated inside that account and pulled all the addresses out. No one I spoke to had ever seen such magical wizardry before and I felt pretty thrilled. We never stored the username and password but I still wondered if we could somehow get into trouble. It amazes me so many people were so happy to use it. Many years later, I’ve faced multiple websites offering Plaid’s help to retrieve data (even Google Pay offers to log into your bank account) but I always refuse.


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