Amendments to the PayPal Privacy Statement Effective November 27, 2024:
We are updating our Privacy Statement to explain how, starting early Summer 2025, we will share information to help improve your shopping experience and make it more personalized for you. The key update to the Privacy Statement explains how we will share information with merchants to personalize your shopping experience and recommend our services to you. Personal information we disclose includes, for example, products, preferences, sizes, and styles we think you’ll like. Information gathered about you after the effective date of our updated Privacy Statement, November 27, 2024, will be shared with participating stores where you shop, unless you live in California, North Dakota, or Vermont. For PayPal customers in California, North Dakota, or Vermont, we’ll only share your information with those merchants if you tell us to do so. No matter where you live, you’ll always be able to exercise your right to opt out of this data sharing by updating your preference settings in your account under “Data and Privacy.”
edit: update title to reflect this is for PayPal USA users
Imagine if you lived in a country with a banking system so modern, that nobody needed Paypal or Venmo.
Oh, like the free bank transfers we’ve had in the UK since… 1997…?
Yes. What a lot of Americans don’t realise is that in other countries, bank account numbers are standardised to include pre-defined bank and branch information. In a sense, account number includes what americans think of as routing number.
People trade bank account numbers like business cards. Businesses post their account numbers for payment. Even a flyer for a local school fundraiser will have an account number listed on it. If you buy something from someone, the seller tells you his account number. You log into your bank and transfer the funds instantly, whether it’s $10 or $10000. You don’t need to know anything except the recipient’s account number.
It’s free. It’s painless. It’s interconnected. It’s bank agnostic. The movement of small monies between individuals should not be commoditised.
Uh, isn’t that normal? People use PayPal because of the easy of use resulting from its inherently low security that is still far better than CC, not because there aren’t sensible alternatives.
The sensible alternative is when banks allow instant free transfer of funds from your account to any other account regardless of which bank or recipient.