Just a little heads up, in case you missed this: banking apps for Android and iPhone are storing sensitive personal information in cleartext.

The applications distributed by such top banks and financial institutions as Wells Fargo and Bank of America placed various types of information at varying degrees of risk. But at least one Android application, distributed by Wells Fargo, stored an account holder’s user name and password on the phone in cleartext. The application also stored account balances on the phone, according to a security researcher who spoke with the Wall Street Journal.

The applications store the information in the phone’s memory, allowing an attacker to easily glean it from the phone by tricking the user into visiting a malicious website. An example would be sending the user a phishing e-mail containing a link to the malicious site.

In other banking news, banks are becoming ever more intrusive into our lives.

An estimated 40 million consumers, including young people and people who prefer to pay in cash, have too little credit experience to generate a useful credit score. But they are likely to pay rent or utility bills, which could help credit bureaus better assess their credit-worthiness.

Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, bought RentBureau—which collects rental-payment data from large property managers—and expects to integrate that information into credit records before the end of the year.

Credit bureaus say they also would like to offer data on cellphone payments, but have run into concerns over privacy issues, which may require legislation to untangle.

And from this second article, there is a classaction lawsuit against news outlets that received personal information from cellphone users, via the advertising company, Ringleader. If the cellphone user tried to delete the code that collected personal information, the database regenerated itself.

shorter version: your lives belong to us.