“If you’re someone who’s buying products on the web, we know who is buying the products where, and we can leverage the data,” Grether said in a statement to the WSJ. He also said that PayPal will receive shopping data from customers using its credit card in stores.
A PayPal spokesperson tells the WSJ that the company will collect data from customers by default while also offering the ability to opt out.
PayPal is far from the only company to sell ads based on transaction information. In January, a study from Consumer Reports revealed that Facebook gets information about users from thousands of different companies, including retailers like Walmart and Amazon. JPMorgan Chase also announced that it’s creating an ad network based on customer spending data, while Visa is making similar moves. Of course, this doesn’t include the tracking shopping apps do to log your offline purchases, too.
I’m so over this. So exasperated by it. Every company in a scramble to the bottom. Meanwhile my country’s reporting a downturn in FOOD spending because people are fucking poor.
We’re being bombarded with ads at every turn, having our data sold off, stolen, or repurposed for LLMs… Meanwhile the customer experience gets worse and worse.
I work in digital ux and honestly, I just want to unplug and go live in a cave.
The sad thing is that even if you really wanted to go off the grid, live in a cave, and rediscover the fire, you wouldn’t be allowed to.
Been interested in computers since childhood, and have been working in the IT industry for over a decade now.
I would love to take a sledgehammer to all of my stupid customer’s servers and go live on a farm. The future we made for ourselves is fucking retarded.
We? No. I didn’t participate in the building of this future.
It should be completely illegal for these companies to just completely fucking change the nature of our agreements decades later. This is bullshit.
It is illegal in Europe, but not widely enforced.
It wouldn’t have to be illegal if we transitioned to a decentralized and anonymous payments system that doesn’t involve the likes of PayPal
Yeah that would work if you weren’t forced through a billion KYC hoops just to buy some BTC or XMR.
It’s annoying but you have to do that kind of stuff to open a bank account or get a new credit card too
Yes but that has been the case for eons. I’m more inclined to be okay with those, just not with some random company that claims to need my sensitive, unchanging information to “allow” me to spend my money. Goes for crypto exchanges as well. I want to jump into Bitcoin for example, but the only way is to use a DEX (already tried, won’t work for me) or to give an exchange this information.
The financial system is screwed. There’s no way to escape the slavery.
The reason they need it is because of the law making it illegal for them not to collect it, though that doesn’t make it any less of a barrier that they have no choice. I would say at this point Coinbase and Kraken are at least as reputable as something like PayPal/Venmo (which I think you can actually also buy crypto from); iirc Coinbase is a publicly traded corporation, has various licenses with governments to operate, is handling custody for major financial institutions now that some crypto ETFs have been approved, it’s not like the early days of crypto where even the biggest exchanges had little real claim to legitimacy.
As for difficulty of using DEX for non KYC trades, I have heard a lot of anecdotes about that confirming your experience that it does not work well. However I would keep an eye on it, there’s significant recent changes with the shutdown of LocalMonero, the launch of Haveno, progress in the development of atomic swaps. I expect that it’s going to improve significantly in usability for the average person, so long as there aren’t major efforts by governments to criminalize it.
I don’t buy that Privacy.com needs it. I use PayPal regularly and never once have I had to give them anything except my name and the credit card info.
That said, I don’t know about Kraken but isn’t Coinbase custodial? I will not use custodial exchanges. In terms of DEXes, I hope they improve because that will be the only feasible solution for me. I tried Bisq, nobody was selling for any less than hundreds of dollars in fiat and I’m kinda nervous about sending cash in the mail even if they have an escrow (as AgoraDesk/LocalMonero did).
If you are comfortable with PayPal you can buy crypto from them afaik, though I am fairly sure you will have to provide additional KYC info than name and credit card, most of the cryptocurrency community obviously hates KYC and there would absolutely be centralized non-KYC options for buying crypto if it wasn’t blatantly illegal to offer that.
isn’t Coinbase custodial? I will not use custodial exchanges
That’s totally fair but consider that if your intention is to purchase crypto and immediately withdraw it to a personal wallet, there are zero practical drawbacks to an exchange being custodial because they are only holding your crypto in custody for the brief period of time between when you click the buy button and when you click the withdraw button. A DEX with escrow is going to be less custodial than that, but I would call it still a little bit custodial, since even if the escrow person doesn’t have the option to take your crypto for themselves they could still potentially collude with the seller and send it back to them, which means there is a brief window when the crypto you have purchased is not truly under your personal control. You can have a crypto to crypto dex be perfectly non-custodial (ie. Uniswap), but you can’t have a fiat to crypto exchange be perfectly non-custodial.
GNU Taler could replace Paypal, we can only hope.
I’m so fucking tired…
Guess I’ll delete my PayPal account.
I really wish there were another option. The only other option is to give raw credit card data to vendors, which is horrible for security given all the data breaches that happen. And no, card masking services like Privacy.com aren’t an option when they’re requiring your SSN (which is a load of BS).
In the beginning PayPal was needed due to credit cards not working for international payments. Now not so much. They are giving you a reason to leave.
Opt out to payment data sharing is pretty illegal in EU.
I’m kinda surprised to hear they didn’t already do that… I guess I just assumed that was the entire point of them acquiring “honey” and had been doing it since at least that point.
I assume most things advertised in apps and websites to be low quality or scammy. I hate advertising enough that I actually avoid any large company that throws ads in my face because I assume they can no longer rely on their reputations and arr no longer the value they were when they rose to prominence.
Pretty sure my local bank has been doing this for a few years now. I thought I was losing it, but apparently it’s a thing.
Only thing that pisses me off (besides the obvious fact that its my bank doing this, and i dont want ads) is that I get ads for the same stuff I just bought. If your supposed to be some all knowing awesome algorithm that understands me better than I understand myself, send me ads for stuff I might actually want, but haven’t bought yet. Not, literally, the same thing I bought two days ago, and have no need for, for at least another month. Idiots.
Alternatives? Except for not using services that require PayPal.
In America they have VenMo and CashApp, in Europe, it feels like PayPal have a monopoly.
Paypal was the fast way to transfer money until 2024 in the EU.
But the EU has recently made it mandatory for banks to offer free SEPA instant payments. 15 seconds to send up to 100k as far as I know.
BTW: Look at the share price and how it went down and did not recover…
I’d never heard of SEPA. That’s actually quite cool. Does that mean no more seeing payments pop up six days later.
SEPA is actually what we had so far. That is how the employer sends you the money. That’s how you pay rent. That’s how you pay off debts. That’s how your insurances take money from you.
SEPA instant payments is what’s new and it allows to transfer money to someone in under 15 seconds. It existed for a few years, but usually cost money and was not even available for all banks. That’s changing now. Step 1 is making it free and force all banks to offer it. Step 2 will be replacing the old, slower system with it completely.
Is it just me or are cheques still the best, cheapest, most secure, and generally universal way to send money from one person to another?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past few weeks.
- Assuming all parties have a bank account, you normally can get checks for free or some nominal amount.
- Checks can be deposited via a bank’s mobile app.
- They don’t require you to download a separate app.
- You can stop a check by calling your bank
- Since your money doesn’t leave the bank, it’s FDIC insured
Yes I know that the MIRC line isn’t secured but your account is still protected by the bank for any fraud. You don’t get those same protections from venmo or cashapp.
The closest I’ve seen is zelle but not every bank supports it.
Every bank supports depositing in a check.
Is it just me
Yep, it’s just you. The number one thing is the instant transaction.
PayPal’s hegemony must end.
Hegemony? eBay and Play Store are the only places I’ve seen PayPal for the last decade
As of 2022, PayPal operates in 202 markets and has 426 million active, registered accounts.+700 000 corporates accept PayPal payment, top 1000 : 72%. 1.5 billions in transactions. They own iZettle, Honey, Braintree, venmo, curv, paidy, gopay, … I think hegemony was the right word.
Paypal is everywhere. Many sites accept it, even government ones.
Luckily, they’re not the only ones in the game.
As far as data goes, purchase data is one I can live with businesses doing this kinda stuff with. I’m using their platform to complete the sale, so it’d make sense to me they’d have data of that sale. And it makes sense to me that a business would leverage that data in ways to benefit themselves.
Someone tell me if I should be concerned, but this seems like what everyone else has done as long as they’ve been able to do it.
And it makes sense to me that a business would leverage that data in ways to benefit themselves.
Big fat nope on that one. This is exactly what the GDPR is about. I’m giving you my data for a specific purpose, and unless I tell you otherwise, you have no fucking business using that data for anything else. Gonna be interesting to see how this one plays out in the EU.
