First has signed up with Yodlee of Sunnyvale, Calif., one of several companies that will scrape data from your various online financial accounts — banking, brokerage, credit cards and others — and track them for you on one password-protected website. First's site also keeps tabs on his phone bills, updates him on UPS shipments for work and gives him a bottom line of his total assets and liabilities. How does he like it so far? "It's just amazing," he says.

Not everyone, however, agrees. Because Yodlee and other providers require that you hand over the user IDs and passwords to your financial accounts, critics say you could be opening yourself to financial ruin at the hands of hackers. Reliability could also be a problem: Will the site always be up when you need it? The still fledgling services are shaping up as a test of just how much faith people are willing to place in these ultrasensitive online services.

The data-scraping companies, including VerticalOne of Atlanta and Corillian Corp. of Beaverton, Ore., say they're taking precautions that would make Fort Knox blush. Yodlee keeps passwords and all other account information in a heavily guarded off-site data center. It's open to only three employees, and they must submit to a biometric hand scan to get in. The handling of data at most of these companies is entirely automated: at the end of each day, software robots are dispatched to your online financial accounts. They "scrape" data from the screens and bring them to the companies' computers, where they are turned into a single account statement available only to you. No employee actually handles the data, the companies say, and all transmissions are encrypted.

If it's done right, screen scraping can bring a new level of convenience to the millions of Americans who are doing more and more of their personal-finance work online. Naturally, like every other new dotcom these days, the fees are either nonexistent or nominal; scrapers make their money from advertisements on the sites and licensing deals with other companies that make the services available.

The services are piquing the interest of busy professionals like Sarah Dods, 27, an attorney in Seattle. Having sampled Yodlee to keep track of frequent-flyer miles and the shipping of books she buys online, Dods plans to try it for her checking and savings accounts, money-market account and car loan. She says she works 60 to 80 hours a week and doesn't have time to hunt around for passwords and PINs. "It totally comes down to laziness," she says. "Why not have it all in one place?"

Screen scraping could catch on noticeably in the months ahead. First Technology Credit Union in Beaverton is planning to make Corillian's scraping service available to its 74,000 members by this summer. Members will be able to see their credit-union balances pulled together with information from banks, brokerages and other financial institutions they may use. And a number of people are signing up for a VerticalOne scraping service that is offered as part of OnMoney.com, a personal-finance website based in White Plains, N.Y. In February about 3,000 people registered to use the site, and fully 25% opted to have their account data collected, according to CEO Vincent Passione. "We believe it is a big market that is growing significantly," he says.

Screen scraping, however, does raise some thorny legal issues. If an account is drained, who is responsible — the bank, the customer who authorized the service or the scraping company? "It is just making the landscape more complicated," says Thomas P. Vartanian of the law firm Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson in Washington. Some banks, not surprisingly, are wary of having customers' accounts scraped. First Union Corp. of Charlotte, N.C., for example, questions whether the scrapers are fully disclosing the risks of fraud.

Early fans like Robb First are unfazed. His only problem so far: being unable to access his account wirelessly when he's in a dead zone. That's life in the fast lane.