@panepinto1959 yours is an interesting point of view but I suspect you haven't read the entire thread or don't have a thorough understanding of data security. How is USAA's change to prevent screen scraping a security improvement? If Fidelity Investments uses screen scraping to retrieve USAA data, are you saying Fidelity is an unsecure tool? I will ask you the same thing I asked someone in a previous comment, how is screen scraping unsecure? The process is to authenticate the user information and then extract the data. The screen scraping occurs after the user is authenticated. There is no security improvement because USAA decided to break screen scraping.
Screen scraping is an industry method for grabbing data and minimizes the need to to maintain API's which can be changed without notice to all parties causing problems (like USAA just did). Screen scraping is flexible and dynamic. API's work great when both parties communicate with each other but they are cumbersome at best when they are changed without communication (like USAA did).
No matter how you slice it USAA caused this problem and now everyone, unfamiliar with IT processes, wants Mint to fix something that wasn't broke until USAA made the change.
