Mint.com

Mint.com seems to be a new service for aggregating information about all of an individual's finances - credit cards, bank accounts, etc.. It provides alerts and suggestions, and requires each user to register with their username/password for each financial service that it is accessing.

I watched their security video:
http://www.mint.com/product/videos/mint-security-video/

In the video, Mint CEO Aaron Patzer says more than once that Mint is safe because you can't use Mint to move money around in your accounts - rather, Mint just shows the information and balances (i.e. within the Mint website, all of your information is read-only). The part that is conspicuously missing (and that I think is misleading) is that if someone hacked in to the Mint database and got the username/password for your accounts (which Mint keeps, since they need to be able to log into your account), they could then go to the bank / credit card website for that institution, log in, and change whatever they wanted! Patzer seems to suggest that the only information that Mint is keeping is your email address, and the snapshot data from your accounts - but of course, Mint is also keeping your username/login information for your online bank, credit card, etc.

Banks and credit cards should provide some way for services like Mint to access account information with a login that is different than the one that can be used to make changes to accounts. Something akin to a valet key, giving only limited read-only access. I would feel comfortable providing *that* kind of password to Mint, but would probably not give them the username/password for my accounts with their current setup.