Shame on you Mr. know it all. I trust the readers have the intelligence and common sense to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff here.

In short: get lost LOSER!

We know the Rudder guys and they have always seemed genuinely interested in helping people do better with their finances, which clearly is a mission we love and are on board with. Let me be 100% clear about the motivations behind my response: keeping people interested, and involved, with PFM sites that are going to actually help them save money and that have that as their primary mission.

We don’t want this to be a Ford Pinto. I’ve tried to explain how we deal with this exact issue, and I’d love it if other companies would speak up about the same, so that users understand the precautions people take; I’m glad the BudgetPulse guys chimed in.

They are actually good example. I think we, as a group of sites doing this sort of work in the world, should want people to know that there are automatic options and manual options and that people should be able to choose. Heck, we should want them to know that a choice even exists!

So cut us a little slack. The goal here is to help people, and I’m not so sure jumping to the conclusion that we’re all commenting in some vague advertising scheme is accurate or quite the way to go. =]

I am Nikhil Roy, the Founder & CEO of Rudder.com

First of all, we’d like to sincerely apologize for the error that resulted in the inadvertent distribution of our users’ financial updates. This error was caused was due to a breakdown in process, and not due to a security breach.

Our users’ privacy is of utmost importance to us and we have taken several measures to address the concerns of those effected.

1. We’ve identified and rectified the issue to make sure this will never happen again.

2. Although the emails didn’t include anything that would let others log in to user’s bank accounts, transfer or withdraw money (emails do not include banking credentials, names or SS#s), we’re offering all those affected, a subscription to an Identity Guard service, paid for by us.

3. We’ve set up a hotline for those concerned to call us if they have any questions – (877) 730-4914 xtn 0.

4. We’ve set up a blog post that people can go to see what exactly happened and what we are doing about it. http://rudderupdate.tumblr.com/

The online banking industry itself (including companies large and small) has been grappling very publicly with issues of security and privacy for many years. We sincerely regret that Rudder let down our users with this incident.

More than anything, we hope that users do not let this incident discourage them from pursuing the benefits of managing their finances online, regardless of which provider they may use. Improving Americans’ financial health has been our mission since day one, and we continue to believe that this new generation of personal finance management applications, including Rudder, have the potential to change the world for the better.

Regards,

Nikhil Roy
Founder & CEO
Rudder.com

I’ll be pulling my accounts from Rudder tonight, they’d gotten pretty buggy for me and I just cant risk it. Ive been using Yodlee anyway but I liked Rudder because of the forecasting calendar.

But seriously, I think everyone with a horse in the PFM race has to be very sensitive not only to the needs of our customers (I’m VP of Finagilous LLC, creators of BudgetSketch) but also of your perception of our industry as a whole.

The fallout of the Rudder issue effects us all, producers and consumers. We, the producers have been given a wake up call. Some of us were already awake. Others are still sleeping. Your challenge as a consumer of our services is to choose your PFM partner carefully.

Good luck!