“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.
It should be completely illegal for these companies to just completely fucking change the nature of our agreements decades later. This is bullshit.
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).
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.
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.
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.
