Comment by lolinder
7 days ago
Yep. When we closed on our house we got a whole lecture from the title company about how frequently data breaches lead to wire fraud and to not trust anyone. Mortgage originators are constantly under attack to try to get at the information that OP is asking people to just casually upload.
Their aggressive dismissal of the concern is not a good look.
I am not dismissing the concern, I was stating the tool solves an even larger concern. I'm doing everything I can to setup it up to be secure, private, and worthy of trust and addressing the feedback points.
If you have suggestions more than "don't trust this random internet tool even if it gives you free advice, regardless of the value it offers", please let me know [thanks emoji]
With all due respect, that is the fundamental problem here. Your tool may provide value to your users but uploading mortgage documents to random third parties is de facto dangerous and encouraging users to act irresponsibly.
A great analogy would be a website that asks users to provide their usernames and passwords for sites to see if it’s a strong password or if it’s been compromised. “Sorry, the credentials stouset / hunter2 were found in our database for Hacker News.”
Sure maybe you’re a saint and don’t store or misuse this data. But such a site would in the best case be training users to do a very wrong and dangerous thing. In the worst case you get breached by attackers who do use the collected data to do evil.
> A great analogy would be a website that asks users to provide their usernames and passwords for sites to see if it’s a strong password or if it’s been compromised. “Sorry, the credentials stouset / hunter2 were found in our database for Hacker News.”
This is actually a really good analogy because it does illustrate that it's not a completely crazy ask—people do trust Troy Hunt to run such a site. But OP should be much more understanding of how dangerous the concept is and offer options to resolve concerns (Troy allows downloading the passwords list to check locally), especially while they're not Troy Hunt-level famous and still are trying to build up trust.
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On a per individual basis, I think most individuals would prefer to overpay mortgage fees slightly rather than lose the entirety of the money they wire.