And if you use an accountant instead, what software does your accountant use, and does the publisher of that software claim rights to exploit your financial information?<p>(I've been buying the TurboTax personal and small business edition for a few years, on CD-ROM. I've had a protocol with a KVM virtual machine on Linux, in which the image is loaded into a new Windows 7 image, TurboTax installed and updated over the network, and then that image booted without network, and never again connected to the network, before I load last returns' data, and begin entering data for the new return. My sense is that this is probably not sustainable, and, any year, Intuit can make it so that you have to give them rights to your data if you want to prepare your tax return. A couple years ago, I implemented the entire federal form 1040 and some schedules as Scheme code, as an experiment, and it was a huge headache, but doable, for a startup. It seems like an unpleasant/disreputable business to be in, especially if companies are lobbying politicians to make the US tax return process a huge burden, so that people will buy their software/service. And perhaps share their private financial information.)
This is why I wrote free, open-source budgeting software. All of the source is available on Github, and it is available on all OS-es.<p><a href="https://github.com/reZach/my-budget" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/reZach/my-budget</a><p>I'm tired of people being sneaky and selling all of our information and making billions off of us. Of course, we let them, but only because it's very confusing reading (and understanding) all the legal jargon.<p>(FYI - I'm actively developing this software, so if you have comments or wants, let me know and I can see if I can make it happen for you. Thanks friends of HackerNews).
Mining user data on Mint seems relatively understandable as Mint is free service. However, why bother do the same on TurboTax? TurboTax sells $60-$150 per copy per year, it has 31 million users in 2016, that's about $3B annual revenue. Isn't that profitable enough?
Is there anything like a self-hosted alternative to Mint? The automated balance and expense tracking is really nice but it's obviously a security and privacy nightmare.
I love Mint but wow do they have more data on me than Google and Amazon combined.<p>I used to think that selling me credit cards is fine but now I'm sure my analytics are sold every which way.
I used TurboTax for Windows for the first time this year to do my taxes. Since I don’t trust them as a company, I set firewall rules to block all internet access to the program and all its other helper programs. It refused to run until I connected to the internet update it. So I let it connect and update and then blocked it again before starting to enter my data. I got everything entered and then tried to output the tax return for printing but it wouldn’t let me finalize everything until I connected it back to the internet to do another update. Why even bother buying locally-run software if it requires an active connection to the internet? Very frustrating experience all around.<p>(Also it’s super crappy software besides, I would not recommend it even if you get it for free. And even after you buy it, they upcharge you at the last second so be ready to pay more than expected. It’s the Comcast of tax software.)