OT -- 90-day limits in the financial world for downloading your data.

[Fred]

This is extremely off-topic, but had to ask this.

Just about everything financial I've done online, from stock trading to
banking, all have 90-day interval limits on how much data you can
download from your accounts at a time. And since I have need of
downloading several years' worth for some purposes, I am not looking
forward to doing this. Yeah I know I could write a couple of scripts to
get around it, but I've got better things to write scripts for.

I spent half an hour on the phone today with Fleet or Bank of America or
whatever they are calling themselves this week asking this very
question. At first, I got this moron who simply did not understand the
question no matter how simply I phrased it. Then I got his supervisor
who gave the quick quip that the website/software simply does not
support it. Upon asking why, I got the usual "duh, I don't know -- I
just work here" type of response. 

I even tried to Google this question, also with nothing turning up
useful.

So, maybe some of you have had some banking experience. Is there some
sort of obscure Federal regulation or similar that stipulates that
financial institutions can only allow a max of 90 days of data at a time
to the customer? And why would their be such an inane restriction,
anyway?

Or maybe it's some great dark conspiracy... naw. :-) Maybe someone
somewhere fears that if customers could download all their financial
data in one click that it would trigger major financial chaos around the
world. Or it would cause the moon to crash into the Earth. Or a gamma
ray burst in our neighborhood.

Just Curious.

-- 
Fred -- fred at lrc.puissante.com -- place "[hey]" in your subject.
The mass of humans on planet Earth -- regard them as the ebbing 
seas in the winds of change. They ebb, they flow, they know not 
where to go.