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“PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

seafile.de

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Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#101

Post by nakodari »

Another victim of Paypal here. I run Jumpshare, a file sharing and collaboration service for creative professionals. This is what Paypal sent us:

"May 8, 2016: When you signed up for your PayPal account, you agreed to our User Agreement and Acceptable Use Policy. Because some of your recent transactions violated this policy, we've had to permanently limit your account.

Please remove any references to PayPal from your website."

They never mentioned which transactions violated the policy, we have never had any complains from our customers. There was no prior warning. We called them and they asked us to email them. We sent multiple emails and nobody bothered to respond back. We lost 30% of our recurring monthly revenue right away!

We now use Stripe as our sole payment service provider. After this experience, we will probably never accept Paypal again.

Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#102

Post by therealmarv »

chopin wrote: post #94
therealmarv wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put every company which sends your personal data outside EU to court (Safe Harbour rules were kicked in the butt some time ago). Some people are even trying that with Facebook (and may be successful with that).

>Safe Harbour rules were kicked in the butt some time ago Yes I know that. Yet I don't know of any company being shut down who violates this. There are some minor fines which afaik are disputed. In my opinion this decision has been pretty toothless so far.

I think nobody is interested in shutting down companies in general. Fines can be hurtful in general and if you are a serious company you reduce your risks and do not do anything against the law. I would not say it is toothless... there is a big market now (even Microsoft is in there) which promotes cloud services in your own country.

Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#103

Post by lentil_soup »

phillc73 wrote: post #39
beobab wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barclays and Natwest in the UK will allow you to send money to anyone with an email address. Can't speak for other banks, though. But all banks will transfer money if you have a recipient account number and sort code.

And it's quick. I can send money between two different UK bank accounts, using sort code and account number, and it appears in the recipient's account within about half an hour. In Europe (Germany and Austria from my experience), many online services specifically support bank transfers using an IBAN number. It does seem to take a little longer though for the money to process.

Germany is pretty bad in banks to be honest. Transfers can take a whole day even between my own accounts and no way of seeing any movements during the weekend, incredibly old school.

Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#104

Post by [deleted] »

mootothemax wrote: post #76
raimue wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Article is currently unavailable" Searching for this entry with keywords like "file-sharing" did not turn up anything.

>Searching for this entry with keywords like "file-sharing" did not turn up anything. Well that's really helpful of them. I've updated the link, can you read it now? Edit: FWIW, this was on the first page of Google for me - in Poland - when searching "paypal file-sharing"

[deleted]

Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#105

Post by friendzis »

rplnt wrote: post #58
malinens wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a feature in torrent clients which add some random bytes to videos when downloading them without braking the video itself so md5 checks would be useless for illegal content downloads

Aren't the files matched by checksums though? I.e. you have a checksum and that's how tracker knows what you want?

I guess GP meant that torrent client could e.g. pad a file on disk (safest option) and store that metadata along with original hash. Hashes would not change over the torrent network, but would be different in other networks

Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#106

Post by raimue »

mootothemax wrote: post #76
raimue wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Article is currently unavailable" Searching for this entry with keywords like "file-sharing" did not turn up anything.

>Searching for this entry with keywords like "file-sharing" did not turn up anything. Well that's really helpful of them. I've updated the link, can you read it now? Edit: FWIW, this was on the first page of Google for me - in Poland - when searching "paypal file-sharing"

Thanks, the link works now for me.

Apparently this depends on the country. Your link includes JP for Japan and the contact mail address for Japan (which ironically is spelled wrong).

I really cannot reach it from Germany without this ?country.x=JP.

Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#107

Post by Arnt »

therealmarv wrote: post #87
cm2187 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to the world of financial regulations! You may have not realised but banks and any financial institutions have been deputised by the regulators to be the financial police. They need to ensure that none of their client use financial services to commit crimes or launder the proceeds of a crime, under the penalty of heavy (up to multi billions) fines. Particularly in the US. I am pretty sure this is what is forc…

yeah. USA. But this is Germany and EU and you violate either PayPal terms or the laws of the country.

That doesn't seem entirely clear.

For example, Seafile could have said "Files are accessible only to one customer. It is of course possible to share passwords. However, we use geoip to monitor the number of locations used by each customer, and take appropriate action when a customer's set is oddly large. This should effectively block the use of Seafile for piracy." Perhaps Paypal would have said no, but perhaps yes.

Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#108

Post by Draiken »

thwd wrote: post #52
weego wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eaten alive by crypto currencies I worry about your perception of how the world outside of techy people works.

Agreed; with both of you. Maybe it won't be crypto-currencies, but Paypal Has To Go®. Let them screw up two or three more times. They're antiquated and operate like a typical barely-legal, gray-area, fee-riddled credit institution. I wonder why Douglas Crockford, a brilliant man, still works there (other than obviously well compensated time).

Am I just naively pessimistic by thinking they will never go away?

They're equivalent to big banks, and big banks never die. Even governments bail them out when they screw up.

Bottom line, the bankers always wins. That's how the world is setup today.

I'm not a financial expert so this is just my naive view of all the crap that goes on in the financial world. Hope I'm wrong...

Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#109

Post by pantalaimon »

raverbashing wrote: post #81
ladybro wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the alternatives in Europe that make Paypal not needed? Genuinely curious, not saying you're wrong by any means.

You want to pay someone they give you their IBAN and BIK numbers, and you can send them money using this (transfers are usually free or very cheap) No need for handwritten pieces of paper

You still usually need a TAN that's either on a piece of paper at home or generated by a special device (and with Smartphones, I don't really trust mTAN), with PayPal you only need a password. So yes, it's less secure, but more convenient.

Merchants also seem to prefer PayPal because it gives them an instant payment confirmation.

Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

#110

Post by luispedrocoelho »

josteink wrote: post #3

> PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as all our customers’ files for illegal content. They have also asked us to provide them with detailed statistics about the files types of our customers sync and share on https://app.seafile.de That's a pretty big WTF right there. I know PayPal has a on overall pretty scummy reputation, but I still I cannot imagine PayPal doing this because they themselves th…

Regulations will probably come in the form of making these types of checks mandatory.

See, for example, how US Senators pressure payment providers to check up on whether their customers may be profiting from illegal file-sharing:

https://www.leahy.senate.gov/press/judiciary-chair-leahy-urg...

If Dropbox-style hash checking of files could be seen as the standard in the industry, I can see how failing to do that could be seen by a court as potentially negligent.

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