[FIN] Is This the End of Siri and Alexa?

Where There's a Fin, There's Probably a Shark

“Everybody needs an assistant,” says the caption on nearly every frame of Fin.com’s four-minute demo video that demonstrates nothing. What’s more, you'll need to pay Fin $120 per week, or more, for an anonymous band of impersonal personal assistants. Also, you'll have to forfeit your right to due process, allow Fin to spam all of your contacts, and - the icing on this cake - hand over the keys to your digital wallets so Fin can do its job.

Fin is the breathtakingly overreaching brainchild of two Silicon Valley bros. Andrew Kortina co-founded Venmo, a free peer-to-peer payment system owned by Paypal. Sam Lessin is a Harvard-educated investment “angel” who’s worked for Bain Capital, held the job of senior product VP at Facebook, and is now - an “intern” at digital news upstart The Information, which was founded by his wife, Jessica. You trust them already, don’t you?

Fin is not at all up-front about how, exactly, it works. The demo video shows Millennials rattling off haphazard wishes to Fin via their smartphones. The major selling point of the four-minute “demo” seems to be that you don’t have to know anything about verbal communication to use it; just start babbling and Fin will figure out what you want, then get it for you. You know, just like Mommy did when you were in diapers.

Behind the scene, as I gleaned from a tedious white paper, lies a machine-learning algorithm, a database in which Fin stores everything it can learn about you, and some human beings who actually find and book reservations at restaurants you’ve never heard of, buy things using your credit card data, and find a time that’s convenient for both you and your equally busy friend to meet for drinks. These are just a few examples of what Fin claims it can do. Nobody, Fin implies, can do such things for themselves; “everybody needs an assistant.”

How well does Fin work? Not very well, according to a handful of hands-on reviews posted at ProductHunt.com; here’s one example:

“My first request was to send flowers to someone for under $50. The ETA given was 95 minutes. Three hours later I had gotten no feedback. Concerned that I going to end up spending more on the service than the flowers, I asked for a status. I got feedback that the task would take longer but I was only being charged for the active minute. My ETA increased to 10 hours. As I watched the cost balloon up to $38, I cancelled the task.”

That $38 was the cost of Fin’s service, not the flowers that it failed to get ordered after more than three hours. Nowhere is it made clear what “active minutes” are, so assurances that you’ll only be charged $1 for each of them are not so reassuring.

Test Drive Aborted

I started to sign up for Fin, not because I can’t order flowers myself (I run FlowersFast.com an online flower-ordering service, after all), but simply to report on the experience to you.

The very first thing Fin wanted was access to my Google account’s contacts, calendars, and emails, which it wished to “modify” but promised not to delete. Hmmm, those permissions are reasonable for an app that needs to correspond and schedule things on my behalf, so I granted them.

But then, up popped Fin’s EULA (end-user license agreement), privacy policy, and data collection policy, all of which are dense legalese and bewilderingly intertwined. But I read them, and laughed ever louder at these choice bits:

The mandatory arbitration clause is the very first paragraph of the EULA. By accepting the EULA, you forfeit your right to sue Fin, its employees, and its partners no matter what they do. Strike One.

"Fin also uses the Information it collects to send Communications (including letters from our founders and other thought leadership, as well as invitations to use Fin) to others, including people Fin learns about from you." Strike Two. No, Fin, you and your "thought leader" pals are not going to spam me and all of my acquaintances.

"Right of Publicity. You give Fin the right to use your name and photograph in promotional content and Communications sent to people who Fin thinks might be in your network, including invitations to potential Fin users." Strike Three, and Fin owes me a new keyboard!

In some rare cases, there's a Strike Four in baseball. There's also one on the Fin pricing page, which says "most users spend between $500 and $5000/month." Wow... you'd have to eliminate a couple of zeros to even get me to take this for a test drive!

After reading that, I closed the Fin page and immediately went to the Google My Account page. Under “Apps with account access,” I found Fin and removed it. Don’t worry about getting Fin spam with my profile photo on it; the Google account I used does not contain any of my readers’ contact info.

I'm not trying to say that the people behind Shark are dishonest -- just that Fin seems like a non-starter. (Did you know that in French, "fin" means "the end"?)

Fin touts a half-dozen glowing endorsements, all from Silicon Valley startup CEOs and venture capitalists. If anyone can afford and needs Fin, these are exactly the sort of people I would bet on. You and I certainly do not. Your thoughts on this topic are welcome. Post your comment or question below...