This page collects a lot of dirt on consumer banks that’s useful for ethical consumers.
Credit Unions invest money into the respective communities they serve and of whom their members comprise.
yeah, credit unions are less likely to have unethical investments. But they bring a separate set of problems. Since they are small they struggle to profit, so they cut corners by outsourcing everything, like the website, the app, printing checks, printing statements, bill pay, etc. Credit unions have become helpless with all the outsourcing of quite trivial tasks. So they all outsource to the same 1 or 2 suppliers for each service. Then you find that a handfull of giant corporations end up seeing the data of all credit union customers. In effect, a credit union is just a proxy brand of giant corporations. Many credit unions now expose their customers to Cloudflare.
So you basically have to choose between shitty investments (commercial banks) or privacy compromises (credit unions as proxies for giants).
I pulled my checking and savings from banks because of those to whom they were denying services.
The larger credit unions may be worth a look: they often develop their own tools in-house. Navy Federal CU, Alliant CU and Lake Michigan CU come to mind: the latter two have backdoors to membership. All three have A or A+ health rankings from DepositAccounts.com
I would immediately nix Alliant CU and Lake Michigan CU because their website goes through Cloudflare. So they are not financed well enough to secure their own website. The biggest web-centralizing tech giant in the world is Cloudflare. Those two CUs use Cloudflare in a way that excludes people arbitrarily, which makes them overly exclusive.
Navy FCU blocks Tor users from applying. That’s not as bad as using Cloudflare, but KYC rules do not require knowing a customer’s IP address so Navy FCU disrespects privacy enough to not have my respect. It also bothers me that if you click on “Eligibility” at the bottom of the landing page, it directs to a page that says nothing about eligibility and only pushes an arbitrary ad. That’s not really something to be non-transparent about. People need to know if they are wasting their time before they apply, particularly if they have no connection to the Navy.
Who would you recommend?
I wish I knew! Since commercial banks are mostly tied to harmful investments you pretty much have to nix commercial banks because AFAIK there is no way to stipulate that your money must not facilitate those investments. That leaves CUs, most of which have eligibility restrictions and most outsource with reckless disregard. But if you use a credit union purely offline, that’s perhaps the best option. If you never login, then there’s a good chance Cloudflare does not see your financial info. So you’ll want paper statements. That means looking for a CU that does not have the paper statement fee. And you also need to scrap billpay, not just because that uses the MitM’d website but also because the billpay service is another giant centralised MitM who likely sells your data. That means either you’ll be writing paper checks and paying postage, or you’re going to arrange for payees to pull the money out (e.g. autopay from the credit card company). But having control is better, so pick a CU that includes free blank checks (which is becoming increasingly less common).
I also suggest getting a checking account /without/ interest. Because that crappy minuscule interest payment of 10¢/month triggers extra reporting and statements, and bookkeeping effort. It’s not worth it.
So, ideally:
- free paper statements (funny how FIs advertise “free e-statements”, which was maybe only worthy of praise in the 1990s)
- free checks (now they tend to just give you a paltry 3 or 4 blank checks when you open an account, not even a whole check book; but a thorough investigation may reveal a CU that gives a few whole checkbooks to start and periodic free refills)
- no interest
In Germany there’s a bank that will e-mail you your statements so you don’t have to login. It’s the only bank in the world that’s customer oriented like that. They PGP encrypt the statements. Apart from that, banking is a sad state of affairs.
How do I evaluate a CU’s privacy in the manner you do?
I have a script that resolves the hostname to an IP address, then it checks to see if the IP is tied to a Cloudflare ASN range. But there are many other ways to check:
- there is a Firefox plugin called “Cloud Firewall” which can be configured to block Cloudflare sites
- there is a collection of useful plugins here for both FF and Chromium: https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/addon The BCMA one will automatically redirect attempts to visit a Cloudflare site to the archive.org mirror of the page.
- without any tools, you can hit F12 in FF or Chromium when visiting a website, and look at the headers. If there is a “CF-Ray” header, then it’s a Cloudflare site.
- if you install Tor, then try to visit the website of the CU. If you are blocked or forced through a CAPTCHA, then you are likely on a Cloudflare website if you see “one more step”. It’s best to test with a browser other than tor browser configured to go over tor because those browsers get the worst treatment.