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?
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.
Literally anything else? ACH transfers is a reliable mechanism to send money. It’s not as user friendly, though.
I use PayPal mastercard but that’s run by synchrony? Is this part of PayPal’s problems?
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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.
@badelf Well, shit
Please no. :( I do like 99.99% of online payments through them because the convenience they offer is really great, especially with recurring payments. :/
At this point they are somewhat catching up on what traditional banks are doing it seems…
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
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.
