Wall Street Journal (paywalled) The digital payments company plans to build an ad sales business around the reams of data it generates from tracking the purchases as well as the broader spending behaviors of millions of consumers who use its services, which include the more socially-enabled Venmo app.
PayPal has hired Mark Grether, who formerly led Uber’s advertising business, to lead the effort as senior vice president and general manager of its newly-created PayPal Ads division.
I’m not surprised. Just disappointed.
You know you’ve got a problem with advertising when even the banks want to become ad platforms. People complain about misinformation on social media, while behind their backs and under their feet the whole economy noisily turns into a competition to see who’s best at deceiving people.
Friends don’t let friends use PayPal. If something goes wrong and eventually something will, you will find zero customer support. Add exploitation to the list of reasons.
What do you use as a PayPal replacement?
Just put the card in directly on random websites.
I’m not joking - if you follow your existing “should I even be using this site anyway?” signs, it’s going to typically be fine (in 2024!) to use your debit card there.
(Edit: To be clear, things have changed. Time travelers from the past should absolutely not follow this advice back in 2002!)
And when something does go wrong, you’ll get better support from your credit union than PayPal would. (You don’t still use a bank like a sucker, right…?!)
The worst case, usually, is they reverse the fraud and issue a new card to prevent further fraud.
So I guess it’s a few things:
- Get a credit union, rather than a bank.
- Choose one or two of debit (edit: or credit) cards for all online use. Life is simpler when fraud does occur, if I have another card that still works for gas and groceries.
- Use the debit card directly, online, with any trusted site. There’s no need for PayPal to exist anymore.
Many years ago, PayPal’s innovation was treating people who shop online like actual people. The rest of the world has caught up, while PayPal lost sight of that.
Source: I worked in FinTech. It’s amazing how bad your current options are, but it tends to work out, anyway. There’s an extremely ethical and detail-oriented army of women named Karen, behind the scenes, looking out for you.
Edit: And as far as I can tell, not one of the extremely ethical and detail oriented women named Karen works for PayPal. Big tech companies rarely successfully keep that kind of no-nonsense-tolerated top talent.
General advice is never use a debit card, use a credit card, it changes theft from a big problem to a manageable one.
I’ve heard this advice as well. It certainly doesn’t hurt, if you have credit cards, to prefer them.
I imagine it is a lot nicer to have a fraudulent item on a future bill, than an actual fraudulent deduction from a current active account. And fraud correction is prompt enough, that the bill never comes due on a CC, whereas the money is, indeed, missing immediately on a debit card.
That said, not having any credit cards, I would never open one simply for the fraud protection.
Debit card fraud correction has always been prompt and accurate, for me.
The card companies do not discriminate, currently, between corrections on credit and debit cards. Currently, that’s largely thanks to contract language with their debit card customers that prevents them from such discrimination.
I added disclaimers like crazy above, because FinTech is a constantly evolving industry with constantly changing terms of service. And because most people working in FinTech are assholes who want to scam you.
Edit: I’ve corrected the above advice with yours, thanks! There’s certainly no reason to prefer debit over credit for online use, for anyone who has both card types. I just have a bad habit of using the words interchangeably because I only carry debit cards.
In Spain (not sure about Europe in general) things are slightly different.
I have been living in Canada for 9 years, and there if you see a transaction you don’t recognize in your credit card statement you phone your bank and they take care of that.
Here in Spain you need to go do the police, file a report, then talk to your bank, then they’ll think about it.
So when I came back I was talking with some guys I know and they convinced me that, at least around here, it’s still a good idea to use Paypal. You also get faster refunds, etc (and that could be due to some European regulation, not sure).
Santander and Caixa are perfect examples of how to terribly handle fraudulent payment disputes. I worked in the industry is it’s kinda well known they don’t even follow scheme (Visa/MC) requirements and when you ask them to escalate to scheme they gaslight you.
Knowing this is the hoops you have to jump through in .es means it makes sense they don’t have a robust anti-fraud process outside of .es.
Interested myself. So far I had only good experiences as a customer, though i hear they are pretty rough towards vendors. It is also widely accepted where I live (EU), which makes it very convenient.
But i am always eager to stop using a corporate product or service.
I’ve generally had good experiences with Privacy.com. It seems like a decent solution when I want something from a semi-reputable website.
I particularly enjoy the bit where cards are vendor-locked, which has been interesting to observe in a couple of instances where a site seems to have had their credit card db breached and the attackers turn around and try to use the card on another site, where it is inevitably denied, but I still get an email that shows which site got hacked and where the attackers were trying to use the information.
But how can you trust them not to screw you over. ( The apparent goal of every company). Now days… Even Google has turned Evil… Meaning you can literally no longer trust Any company
Everything is transient and eventually becomes shitty, sure, but I generally trust them because they’re able to make money just from people using the service. I don’t know how profitable they are, but I am reasonably certain that as the card issuer they get a cut of every transaction. Given that they aren’t issuing physical cards and have no obvious costs other than maintaining their platform, I don’t see a reason not to trust them in the medium term.
Bitcoin? :s
This is indeed one of the things cryptocurrencies exist for, but social media denizens around these parts have long conditioned themselves to hate it.
So a rock and a hard place, it seems. Which is more hated; the big data-harvesting corporation co-founded by Elon Musk, or a big bad NFT-hosting blockchain?
For people who are concerned about data harvesting I would recommend something like Monero or Aztec over Bitcoin, though. Bitcoin’s basically obsolete at this point, coasting on name recognition and inertia, and has no built-in privacy features.
I use PayPal mastercard but that’s run by synchrony? Is this part of PayPal’s problems?
Literally anything else? ACH transfers is a reliable mechanism to send money. It’s not as user friendly, though.
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I’ve told companies that use PayPal to register as a business, not as an individual. If you’re an individual and a lot of money comes through, they will lock you down for “regulatory reasons.” Which is hilarious because they are technically not a bank (But I think they are a NA). You’ll never see that money again.
All posts should be like this, say if it’s paywalled so we don’t have to click.
There’s a certain irony in bemoaning subscription news paywalls on an article about the alternative, unsavory monetization paradigm…
Shocked face?
It is problematic that it is popular
Well… Time to delete my PayPal account I only used maybe once…
Good luck having them delete your data cuz they didn’t delete mine.
Unable to find other sources of income, PayPal is now squeezing the margins for money. The detachment of the stock market from reality marches on.
Please no. :( I do like 99.99% of online payments through them because the convenience they offer is really great, especially with recurring payments. :/
@badelf Well, shit
So… what easy payment processor is there as an alternative to Paypal?
That practically all places use? None that I know of.
I think the closest is Google Pay, but i doubt it’s any better for privacy vs Paypal
Google Pay or Apple Pay, probably even Samsung Pay too, but I personally wouldn’t consider any of them good for privacy.
I’ve had good success with Wise and Cash App.
There are plenty, although some might be regional, others had security issues. In Europe, I know of Klarna, Skrill and (kind of) Revolut. In the US there are Block (Cash App) and ofc Google, Apple and Amazon… But I guess they are not really an upgrade :D
Mhm yeah Klarna could be an option. And yeah GAA would more like a sidestep or a down right downgrade :D
As the propensity of scams connected to PayPal grew over the years I stopped using them some time ago
At this point they are somewhat catching up on what traditional banks are doing it seems…
Do we all need a competitor to Alphabet/Google? I’d say yes, I don’t think Alphabet is behaving fairly.
The issue is every competitor will use the same targeted ads. No advertiser who is not using targeted ads by utilizing tracking data will never be as competitive because their ads won’t be as effective.
Until we can kill these types of advertising by making laws against it or make tools that counteract them widespread enough that it makes the business unprofitable we will continue to have our data used against us.
I thought every bank or payment processor did this? 🤔
Banks don’t have an ad business like this, though they will have some advertising in general.
They also all, I believe by law, have opt-out for all third party sharing of data for this purpose.
