Had to use Paypal today to make a payment to a company who can't otherwise find a reasonable way to take credit cards online. I feel their pain, having been in that position. Paypal randomly saw that it was reasonable to demand I answer a phone in another country (though I haven't been based there for perhaps 15 years) if I wanted to log in to my account. I had to work around this by having them send a payment request, then paid about USD$1000. Wish they accepted Bitcoin, I was livid at the experience. Every time I deal with Paypal it's the same. Their PR crap a year or two back about "sorting things out" was obviously empty. Stripe isn't much better: after a reasonable start, last time I wanted to use them I couldn't because my address is in a different country to my card (ANYONE LISTENING?). These abuses are reaching a breaking point, nobody is going to deal with credit cards soon. Here in amusingly progressive mainland China, they are a minor mode of payment and shrinking: good riddance!
“PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
221–230 of 348 posts
Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is also a little entertaining that their "brand risk" department is probably doing so much unintentional damage to the brand. reply Their brand risk department obviosly tries to optimize the brand for someone big, someone nameless, and not for the customers. This itself leads to questions about paypals business model. Are they in business to provide payment services to users, or are their primary customers actua…
Perhaps they want to become "financial Facebook", to profile and and sell users' spending habits.
Or they are being coerced into doing that /conspiracy-theory
Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
#223Earlier 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…
> 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 endure 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. While I fully agree with this sta…
Paypal seems to have a long and ugly history of aggressive-yet-incoherent legal interpretations.
They lock down donations to any unpopular group, and refuse to release already-held funds. They freeze Kickstarter campaigns as soon as someone says the word "fraud", and cause the exact damage they're trying to prevent by tying up all the funds so neither backers nor creators can get the money.
They're incredibly capricious, and as far as I can tell have taken the stance that overcaution is always acceptable.
Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
#224Given that we've all read similar situations happening all over the web, I'm surprised organizations aren't including "paypal drops us for arbitrary reasons" or "paypal freezes our funds with them for arbitrary reasons" in their risk assessments when choosing vendors. In almost every case, that risk should probably push decision makers away from Paypal. It is also a little entertaining that their "brand risk" departm…
For most of their existence, PayPal have been living the "shady questionably-legal startup" dream, operating in a heavily regulated industry while ignoring almost all of the regulations. They've been screwing over their customers, closing accounts on allegation of fraud and dragging out refunding the alleged victims for months and months, since before they were acquired by eBay. People still use their service. It's a…
> For most of their existence, PayPal have been living the "shady questionably-legal startup" dream, operating in a heavily regulated industry while ignoring almost all of the regulations.
I'm not saying you're wrong (because I actually don't know) but this seems to be way off base. What specific regulations are they ignoring? My understanding is that most of the things people gripe about with PayPal are borne out of PayPal's attempt to stay in line with regulations.
Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Eh, I think you might be overly pessimistic.
Big banks screw up impressively, but not consistently. They can go broke and survive, they can commit massive fraud and survive, but they can't be utterly useless at the very act of banking and survive.
Paypal is rapidly approaching that point. It's name is almost synonymous with "we'll ban you without warning, and freeze your funds when we do". It's literally the first thing I expect when I see 'Paypal' in a headline.
Big banks survive partly due to FDIC insurance and similar - they're fairly unlikely to simply strip all the cash from depositors. Paypal, by contrast, has ruined everyone from Amazon sellers, to Kickstarter campaigns, to startups. At this point, I can't imagine starting a business that relied on Paypal without having another, more reliable way of handling payments.
Put it this way: I would trust Chase to handle my paychecks, even if they do make bad investments. If they started randomly freezing 2% of deposits, I would sure as hell not continue trusting them.
Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
#226Well, sorry paypal, but I've seen a host of new payment services crop up lately. Now is not the time to push your clients around.
Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They've already screwed up and screwed people over publicly dozens of times. Dozens of times means absolutely nothing considering the billion that uses them. Do you many how many thousands of times banks and insurance companies actually screw people -- and yet nobody bats an eye? Besides the big assumption is that this is due to PayPals incompetence or malice, and not due to BS regulations (that anybody else will h…
They probably mean either big screw ups, or hundreds of thousands of little ones. Eg, trying to circumvent banking laws, allowing donations to the KKK while refusing to cater to wikileaks, seizing funds from well known legitimate businesses, UX anti patterns (eg fake endorsements from the site), Braintree not understanding why you'd want to use CSP to stop someone stealing credit card details, etc. I don't want to vi…
And I think that "shouldn't be surprised" is what ultimately threatens to kill Paypal.
I wouldn't ever use Paypal as a primary or exclusive channel for a startup, and I'm not alone. It may not become publicly hated, but if companies end up too scared to give it traffic, it will still die.
Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not possible. The torrent protocol works by checking the hash of each file that it downloads so it can reseed the file. If these files were changed by even 1 bit then they couldn't be reseeded back into the torrent network.
unless the "corruption" is reversible by the torrent client, which it would be
Private key for each client which would salt the file when saved and removed when shared. Could be done, but requires computing and breaks when the client is reinstalled.
Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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've already screwed up and screwed people over publicly dozens of times. Paypal does have to go, but I don't think paypal will die until someone offers an equivalent service.
Exactly - for a great deal many people, PayPal is preferable to paying directly to the seller. Until another branded payment provider has that level of mindshare across the general populace, and seen as being secure and trustworthy from twentysomethings to grandparents, then they wont be beaten.
But will companies continue to run the risk of letting Paypal ban their accounts (and often, freeze their funds in the process)?
I can't imagine a consumer revolt, but at a certain point "makes your users feel secure" is outweighed by "makes you terrified you'll lose your money". I suspect that something like Stripe or Square will eventually sell companies on a "we won't screw you over" narrative and start to compete directly.
Re: “PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
unless the "corruption" is reversible by the torrent client, which it would be
If the corruption is reversible then the people doing the checking can also reverse it. They'll have both the corrupt version and the reverse-fixed version and just have to check an extra hash per thing they're scanning for
I guess as long as Public Key Encryption works, something like this should be theoretically possible?