If you truly intend to monetize that way, make a legally binding statement to never sell your users' data to anyone else. Otherwise I personally would never trust you, and honestly even then I'd be skeptical because I assume that legal contract would become void during an acquisition.

If I were to parse this comment in a lawyerly way, I'd conclude you didn't actually say whether your service does or does not sell users' financial data (or whether it plans to do so). Can you confirm for us your company's practices?

We do not sell any financial data and we do not intend on doing so in the future.

The fact that this is a VC-backed startup pretty much guarantees it will be doing nefarious things with its users' data somewhere down the line. Even if not intended right now.

This is an unfair comment because it's stated as a "pretty much" fact when it's simply your opinion.

Additionally, the fact that it's a "VC-backed startup" is irrelevant. Any company with any structure could be doing this.

Eh not really. Having VC backing means you have an extra incentive to do things that a bootstrapped company wouldn't, mainly to please your investors.

Either a business can thrive without selling user data, or it can’t. If it can’t, then eventually the data will fall in the hands of someone willing to sell it. It doesn’t matter if that someone is current management (perhaps under pressure from VCs) or future management (after inevitable acquisition or asset liquidation since the business is not viable). Therefore it does not matter how current management feels about selling user data today, or whether they are vc-funded or bootstrapped. If they aren’t building a viable business, the data they are collecting will be sold eventually.

Well, either it's in the TOS or it's not. Simple. And if it is now, and it vanishes, well, you know what to do.