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.

    • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • UncleGrandPa@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Literally anything else? ACH transfers is a reliable mechanism to send money. It’s not as user friendly, though.

    • Aermis@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I use PayPal mastercard but that’s run by synchrony? Is this part of PayPal’s problems?