Privacy of our Financial Information

Privacy in the Internet era is literally down to Zero. Our mails are read, our buying patterns are analyzed, we ourselves via social sharing websites provide out information on what we do, when we do, where we go, who our friends are among thousands of other data points.

To learn about how much of our information is online and available to companies, do watch this very very interesting video – (Link). Even for those folks such as myself who know quite a bit on these issues, this was pretty mind blowing information.

What about our financial information you may ask. Aren’t they pretty secure?

A few weeks back, I received a post from NSDL (mind you, posted using normal post) that combines all my stock holdings at all the Depository Participants and to top it up, provides the value on date.

Now, they don’t stop at just stocks that are scattered across various depositories but also have column’s for the following asset classes

Equities

Preferential Shares

Mutual Funds

Corporate Bonds

Money Market Instruments

Securitised Instruments

Government Securities

Postal Savings Scheme

Mutual Fund Folio’s

In other words, other for investments in Real Estate, this more or less provides a complete overview of one’s financial affairs and this is sent by Normal Post (Postage of 3 being affixed). Interestingly half of my family did not get this post and as I write this, I wonder – did it get lost or was it ….. (Conspiracy theory) 🙂

If this is one level of stupidity, I stumbled upon another a few days back. Few days back, one Mr. Nilakantan Rajaraman of Funds India wrote a interesting blog post on their successful investors. While no personal data was revealed, if you need to analyze data, every person’s data was seen.

Funds India is a financial intermediary who make it simple to invest in Mutual Funds (though now they also enable you to trade, buy Gold, enable investing in fixed deposits of companies, get Loans (Personal) as well as buy Insurance and the best part, its all FREE

Of course, we all know, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch and in almost all the cases where its free, there is a commission that is paid. But that is paid which is not so bad since they do provide you the ability to do investments more easily.

Of course, with Mutual Funds now enabling Direct investing which cuts out on the commission, there is pretty big a loss for you in the long term if you are using such services for only the ease of use rather than having them act as your personal investment advisor.

But I am digressing (as I usually do) and so, lets return to that blog post (Link). The blog post is able to get a lot of details of where they are investing, how they are investing, how much returns are generated among a lot of info. Then again, the fact that they shall collect and use that info is embedded into their Privacy policy (Link)

If its ain’t bad enough that the Investor loses on potential gains due to the trailing commission that gets charged, its worse in my opinion that private information is shared with them and all that for just enabling you to invest a bit more easily than you can do by visiting the websites of the concerned mutual funds.

I am sure that the information they collect is secured. But the question is, are you comfortable and is this worth it??