Mint: The Price of Convenience

Like most people, I'm always looking out for ways to make my life easier.
AceMoney has been a great finance manager over the years, but its usefulness has waned over time. It suffers from one fatal flaw: all transactions must be added manually. It does allow for raw import files (QIF, QFX, etc), but they are manually downloaded after logging into each bank's website. I wanted something to download my balance for me, and after browsing for new personal finance software, I came across Mint. It's a "top rated online finance service" that claims to seamlessly aggregate all your bank accounts into a fresh, intuitive interface.

Are you freaking kidding me? What jackass would enter his bank information to some free service claiming to be legit?
After reading the endless security jargon and watching the CEO (Aaron Patzer) give a re-assurance speech, I became that jackass. Giving out any account information online makes me nervous, but the promise of utmost convenience and financial transparency pushed me towards my decision.

Since I gave it a try a couple days ago, I admit that I've been pretty impressed. Ajax is being used extensively on the site, but at the same time it's not obnoxious. Like gmail, the search box is smarter than it looks, allowing for criteria filtering (e.g. merchant:XYZ or category:Groceries). Information is editable via a floating DIV element, which is a great alternative to the traditional edit page. The most impressive piece of the site is the Flash/Flex "Trends" area, which dynamically builds a clickable pie chart that filters based on which slice (category) you click. Mint works so well that it includes pending transactions that aren't even on the bank's downloaded QFX file.

Wait a second. How are they getting information that only I can see when logged onto the bank's website?
According to Wikipedia, web scraping is defined as, "any of various means to extract content from a website over HTTP for the purpose of transforming that content into another format suitable for use in another context". Mint uses a company called Yodlee to essentially log into your bank accounts and scrape the HTML contents. It then uses some patented algorithms to separate the useful data from the junk. That data is then passed into Mint's database to be stored and aggregated.

The good
Proponents of Yodlee claim that since it's your data anyways, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. For the Feist vs. Rural case in 1991, the Supreme Court ruled that copying non-copyrightable data (in this case, phone records) is not considered copyright infringement.

The bad and the ugly
Web scraping is traditionally thought of as VERY BAD practice, and is against the terms of use of some websites. Mint supposedly reads all banking balances nightly, which means it could hammer bank servers if not coordinated carefully. The fact that Mint is forced to scrape banking data (instead of harnessing any potential APIs) is evidence that this kind of bank partnership doesn't yet exist.

I'm personally not a fan of how Mint gets my information, but I'm willing to look beyond that for now. From the first moment, my impression of Mint was positive. The interface is clean and intuitive, and the level of attention they put into site security from the ground up is comforting. Most importantly, giving people the opportunity the see their financial "big picture" (and actually SET BUDGETS) could prevent a lot of hardships. What do you think?