MasterCard Forcing PayPal To Pay Higher Fees 260
iComp sends this quote from El Reg:
"PayPal, Google Wallet and other online payment systems face higher transaction fees from MasterCard in retaliation for their refusal to share data on what people are spending. Visa is likely to follow suit. The amount that PayPal has to pay MasterCard for every transaction will go up as the latter introduces new charges for intermediated payment processors. This change is on the grounds that such processors don't share transaction details, which the card giants would love to get hold of as it can be used to research buying patterns and the like. Companies such as PayPal allow payments between users, so the party (perhaps a merchant) receiving the money doesn't need to be registered with the credit-card company. PayPal collects the dosh from the payer's card, and deducts a processing fee before passing the cash on to the receiving party. MasterCard would prefer the receiver to be registered directly so will apply the new fee from June to any payment that is staged in this way."
Card to Card payments (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps if Mastercard and Visa hadn't allowed PaypaI to usurp what they could very well have done themselves, long ago, they wouldn't be in this situation. I've always wanted the ability to painlessly send someone money, directly, and it's idiotic that paypaI (and other 3rd party wallet services) are the only way to do it. Completely redundant.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:5, Funny)
> I've always wanted the ability to painlessly send someone money, directly,
Behold: http://bitcoin.org/en/ [bitcoin.org]
It's not everywhere yet, but it will be soon.
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Well, it's in your fairytale dreamland, that's certain.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:4, Funny)
In Big Bad Ben Bernanke's fariytale dreamland he is seeking help from the Childlike Empress, so that together they can convince Atreyu to believe in the USD, lest it blink out of existence through lack of faith.
I'd say its a coin flip as to which one your money is safest in :)
Re: Card to Card payments (Score:2)
Re: Card to Card payments (Score:5, Insightful)
USD doesn't work so well when the lights go out either. All the notes are the same size - unlike every other currency I've handled there's no easy way to tell them apart without being able to see them.
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All the notes are the same size - unlike every other currency I've handled there's no easy way to tell them apart without being able to see them.
I'm curious, how do blind Americans cope? Here in the UK the notes grow larger as denomination increases.
As an aside, I think we have better portraits too: rather than previous prime ministers we have the likes of humanitarians [wikipedia.org], naturalists [wikipedia.org], composers (albeit overrated IMO) [wikipedia.org], philosophers [wikipedia.org] and engineers. [wikipedia.org] The queen is on all of them, naturally, but having her face on things is pretty much half of all she does.
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Sounds like the US government doesn't comply with its own ADA.
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Isn't there some kind of braille encoding on US bills like on canadian money?
Not currently. They're starting to talk about it. Check again in five years.
Re: Card to Card payments (Score:4, Interesting)
They take their pay in singles.
But, AFAIK, the Bureau of Engraving has been directed to change that because of a lawsuit over that very issue. I'm not sure when the change is supposed to take place, but as far as I know the USD will be coming in different sizes in the future.
Which for me is kind of a shame as it makes sorting a bit harder, but it's completely necessary.
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An alternative, of course, is braille stamped currency.
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And how long do you think this will be "readable", considering the treatment those bills receive?
Re: Card to Card payments (Score:5, Informative)
Are you suggesting that Bitcoin is as safe as the USD? One of those still works when the lights go out...
Don't count on your paper US dollars working when the lights go out. I was in an area with an extended power outage -- the grocery store down the street had emergency generators to keep the freezers and lights on... but they couldn't get their cash register system up and were unable to make any sales (not even cash sales) until the registers came back up. It took most of a day to get the registers working.
Re: Card to Card payments (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's just legislate convenience and free ponies while we're at it. After all, more laws always fixes stuff.
There is a sandwich shop downtown that closes for two weeks every summer, just to allow every person there to have some time off. I suppose you'd like to legislate away their ability to do this, too: How dare they stop operating just because they feel like it!
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I'm not sure how this could be enforced - power outages often come along with another disaster (earthquake, hurricane, etc), so in many cases merchants may not be able to even travel to their store, or the store may be severely understaffed.
Same way you handle all disaster readiness scenarios ... you check on them in advance and confirm compliance of the ability to do so BEFORE the disaster comes.
And how do you check that a store is staffed adequately BEFORE the disaster strikes? Do you require a certain number of employees to live within walking distance? Do you ensure that they live in houses that are outside of a flood zone (or meet some minimal resistance to seismic hazards?) What do you do when half the town is asked to evacuate? Do the cashiers get special ID cards that let them stay behind to help serve remaining residents and disaster workers?
Also, for big-box stores with lots of inventory, there's a security concern with having a lot of cash on-site when electric cash recyclers and other forms of securely storing money may not be working, and armored car service may not be running.
So you're seriously saying that its a problem because they make too much money ... I would love to have those problems, though they really are easy to solve.
If you want to have that problem, try working the
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Not that I think any of these things should be mandated. If the power is out for any length of time the store will compensate. People are going to want to make money and sell things, believe it or no
The problem is... people don't generally stock up food in modern times, so if the store shuts down unexpectedly, people may starve to death, or there may be chaos on the streets, because 20% of people ran out of this week's supply and can't buy food they need to survive.
You seem to be under the impression that grocery stores stock vast amounts of food -- they don't. If those daily delivery trucks stop coming, most stores will start running out of food in less than a day. Google Maps shows about 80 grocery stores in my town of 800,000 (this includes many small corner markets as well as big Safeways and Luckys), so there are about 1000 residents per store. Imagine 1000 hungry people walking down an isle in your store and guess how long it will last. Stores regularly run out
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Are you suggesting that Bitcoin is as safe as the USD? One of those still works when the lights go out...
That raises an interesting question... what happens to the blockchain, when the internet goes down for a while? How long do bitcoins continue to exist, when there is no bitcoin network? how does it ever get reinstated?
What if bitcoin is the only currency, and there's no way to pay workers to get it back up and running?
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I'd say its a coin flip as to which one your money is safest in
That's because you don't have any money. People with serious money will stick with the USD because historically it is safer than gold.
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That's because you don't have any money. People with serious money will stick with the USD because historically it is safer than gold.
Isn't that what they said about the US housing market?
People with "serious money" have a diversified portfolio.
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Let's see what happens after the current BitCoin bubble pops before making any prognostications about is long term viability.
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That's not directly. That is through a foreign currency.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps if Mastercard and Visa hadn't allowed PaypaI to usurp what they could very well have done themselves, long ago, they wouldn't be in this situation. I've always wanted the ability to painlessly send someone money, directly, and it's idiotic that paypaI (and other 3rd party wallet services) are the only way to do it. Completely redundant.
The problem with those kinds of transactions is that they are inherently risky, since there is not a merchant on hand to blame in the event of a chargeback. Visa and Mastercard stayed the hell away from that nightmare, and it is telling that only a company as skeezy as PayPal has managed to make it profitable for so long.
It used to be that Paypal and similar services weren't there to take away transactions from normal merchants (since only small "peer to peer" transactions, like you mention, went through them) but Paypal has grown to be a behemoth that has elbowed it's way into every online merchant's payment options, for some strange reason (what good is it unless you for some reason already have money stored at the bank of paypal?). Mastercard and Visa are naturally skeptical, because PayPal is basically taking mindshare that they could easily shift to their own credit service (if they wanted to start being regulated like a legitimate business, that is.) This is the writing on the wall that PayPal should either rethink their strategy, or accelerate it. Visa, in their own right, has started basically a competitive service (V.me) and is actively going at merchants to reclaim some ground.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:5, Insightful)
Paypal has grown to be a behemoth that has elbowed it's way into every online merchant's payment options, for some strange reason (what good is it unless you for some reason already have money stored at the bank of paypal?).
I can pay using Paypal, Google Checkout, etc., without ever giving my credit card number out to random websites.
That's huge, as I don't have to trust the website quite as much. It still may be a scam of some sort, but at most I would be out the cost of that single transaction, since they won't be able to run up charges on my card.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:5, Insightful)
Basally the problem is banks and credit card companies don't understand the concept of information security. like at all.
Their transaction security model is vulnerable to replay attack (once a merchant has my credit card number and billing address they can charge my card whenever they want)
What PayPal does is require me to log into their service and authorize any transaction before it will be executed. Thus they act as a buffer between my dangerously incompetent credit card company and the potentially villainous merchant with whom I am dealing.
All banks and credit card companies have to do to kill PayPall forever is bring their transaction security model out of the 19th century.
Re:security (Score:3, Interesting)
banks and credit card companies don't understand the concept of information security
They do. But they are not concerned about things like password theft, because neither the bank nor their customers lose money that way.
So nobody cares about what you may perceive as bad security. As this PDF [microsoft.com] linked from this recent /. story [slashdot.org] shows, only third-party suckers lose money when a bank password is abused.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:5, Informative)
All banks and credit card companies have to do to kill PayPall forever is bring their transaction security model out of the 19th century.
What's worse is that they already have exactly that security model. Visa bought Orbiscom a few years ago. Orbiscom is the creater of "disposable" credit card numbers. You log into their system, specify a maximum limit and an expiration date and they generate a credit card number for you that is linked to your primary account. After a merchant charges that number it "binds" to them so that no ther merchants can charge it. Once the credit limit or expiration date is hit, the number stops working completely.
Only a handful of banks use this - Bonk of America is probably the biggest one, they call it "shopsafe." But the only reason they use it is that they inherited it when they bought MBNA. I've been using Shopsafe for nearly 15 years now for all of my online purchases and I've never had a problem. MBNA used to advertise that they never had even a single case of fraud with ShopSafe, I don't know if that's changed or if BoA is too stupid to continue advertising it that way.
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That's unfortunate, I've wanted that for years, but none of the banks and credit unions I do business with offer them. But, then again, I've rarely had problems with this, so it's probably not as useful as it seems. And retailers really shouldn't be storing credit card numbers past the point where they're used.
Really, that's the correct solution, retailers shouldn't be permitted to store these numbers for longer than it takes them to bill the card. They get a transaction ID for it, which is all they really
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:4, Interesting)
For me, the benefit is more about exercising control over what the mechant bills me. The anti-fraud stuff is secondary. These disposable numbers give me the safety of mind that the merchant won't be charging more than I want, be it through error or one of those bogus reocurring charge things.
For example, I purchased a year long subscription to Consumer Reports because I wanted to look up some of their reviews for a couple of big purchases I intended to make last year. Their billing model is to automatically charge you for a renewal. I gave them a disposable number good for just one year's worth of subscription so that I didn't have to worry about them auto-renewing me when I wasn't paying attention and then having to fight it out to undo the charge. So now insterad of auto-billing me, they've sent me a couple of emails complaining that their system could not bill me. Makes me smile that I turned the tables on them. (as an aside, I think Consumer Reports has lost their way, adopting some really anti-consumer business practices - auto renewal and littering their website with identity trackers)
There are other ways to do the same, like using a cash card bought at the local convenience store. For me, disposable numbers are just the most convenient way to exercise that control.
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Interesting, hadn't thought of using it to quash autorenews.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:5, Interesting)
But only if you also trust PayPal. PayPal is not regulated well under most banking or consumer protection laws. PayPal will lock up your money if there's a disputed transaction, with no recourse for the seller (it's hard to separate PayPal from eBay here, since eBay mandates the use of the PayPal option and it's the biggest use of PayPal). I'm baffled why someone would be worried about security of banks or credit cards but then happily get into bed with PayPal.
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"what good is it unless you for some reason already have money stored at the bank of paypal"
I keep nothing in my paypal account. I have it set up with my debit card to charge my real bank account. But it means that the final retailer does not have a record of my debit card number. Paypal is an anonomiser, nothing more, living on the microinterest they get in the time it takes for the escrow to clear.
The other obvious option is that MasterCard and Visa could institute easy-to-use one-use HTTP links and vi
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"you obviously don't use Paypal much if you think you need money in your paypal account, or even a paypal account at all, to buy stuff through it. You can just use your credit card if you don't have a paypal account.
Not universally. There are times I'll click to buy an item on eBay, and given a response that the seller accepts only from Paypal. My credit card is no good to that seller.
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last time I bought something through paypal, there was a (not very obvious) option at paypal's site to use my card without creating an account. It may not have been there (or have been better hidden) when you went, though.
Most of the time yes. But these particular sellers will pop up that they won't accept any sales to people that don't have a Paypal account. Seems odd, but then so are some ebay sellers.
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last time I bought something through paypal, there was a (not very obvious) option at paypal's site to use my card without creating an account. It may not have been there (or have been better hidden) when you went, though.
Most of the time yes. But these particular sellers will pop up that they won't accept any sales to people that don't have a Paypal account. Seems odd, but then so are some ebay sellers.
You misunderstand.
MY businesses is one that accepts only PayPal for eBay purchases. That does not mean you must have a PayPal account to pay. You can pay PayPal with your credit card, using the guest checkout option.
Since eBay has a reputation for buyers who claim non-receipt or pay with fraudulent credit cards, forged money orders, stolen checks, etc. and since eBay requires all sellers to accept PayPal anyway, it is safer for us to rely on PayPal's seller protection guarantee (we provide a tracking number
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I really hate to write in support of some faceless corporation, but my experience is similar: I sell stuff online from my website, and Paypal is the only way I accept money (except for money orders from the occasional Paypal hater, and company checks for large orders; I plan to add google checkout in the future). I've never had a problem with them freezing my money (though I do keep my balance relatively low and only give them ACH access to a separate account with $100 in it in case they go nuts). Their f
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Please do (Score:5, Funny)
Please do! Here is my IBAN number: CH14 0025 5255 F665 2263 0
Thanks.
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I don't know what kind of incompetent banks you have where you live, but banks here don't let anyone with an IBAN set up a direct debit. Our direct debits here in Portugal need to be authorized by the account holder, after proper authentication.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:5, Informative)
That is an insecure option since checks have your account number on them which can be used for fraudulent access to your money. PayPal's escrow through an email address is far safer.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:4, Interesting)
MasterCard: "Okay - what did they buy?"
Retailer: "Our debit card." *click
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PayPal is safe now?
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That wasn't viable until the Check21 act was passed in October of 2003. Paypal was already 3 years old by that point. And really, it wasn't until the past 2 or 3 years that banks have been accepting customer-side deposits by scanning.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:5, Informative)
Check21 is why nobody with any sense uses checks anymore. The inability to get the check back after it's been processed makes it a lot more of a PITA to deal with forgeries than it used to be.
Re:Card to Card payments (Score:5, Interesting)
"That wasn't viable until the Check21 act was passed in October of 2003. Paypal was already 3 years old by that point. And really, it wasn't until the past 2 or 3 years that banks have been accepting customer-side deposits by scanning."
That's not even remotely true.
A check is nothing more than an order for a bank to pay somebody money. While banks prefer that they take the particular form that the bank issues, they don't have to. Checks have been written and accepted on underwear, and even on the side of a pig.
A check has never had to be scanned. It can be handwritten, printed, or anything else. Ever since the 90s, you have been able to get check printing software (and even the legit kind of machine-readable magnetic ink) that let you print your own checks with any bank and account numbers on them. And they are legally LEGITIMATE checks, as long as they are authorized by the account holder.
I had somebody pass a printed check on my account once, without my permission. It didn't look anything at all like a normal check from that bank. But the bank didn't bat an eyelash. They just paid it.
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Any bank could accept any scan, at any time. Or a fax. Most of them just didn't. But that was a matter of bank policy, not law.
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"I've always wanted the ability to painlessly send someone money, directly, and it's idiotic that paypaI (and other 3rd party wallet services) are the only way to do it. Completely redundant."
"Have you heard of popmoney? They have a tab inside my online banking page. https://www.popmoney.com/ [popmoney.com]"
You're BOTH missing the point. PayPal is a way to pay people and take payments, online, without having to go through a bank or credit card company.
Sheesh. Get a clue.
Pass the buck (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess end users will be seeing a fee increase coming our way. Awesome.
Re:Pass the buck (Score:5, Insightful)
I think on every transaction PP should list:
PayPal Transaction fee: $x.xx
*Mastercard Fee: $x.xx
* This fee is due to PayPal refusing to tell Mastercard what it is you're buying so they are now charging PayPal more. Their end cost has not increased, they are just greedy and want more money.
Re:Pass the buck (Score:4, Interesting)
I would not call them honest dicks. They're just dicks. They might just be lesser dicks in this instance.
You have to pay to play! (Score:5, Insightful)
You remember when credit cards used to have annual fees? They didn't just forget about those costs, they just found new ways to make money off you!
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Interest?
Never paid it. Each month a direct debit pays it off. I just get referee. And, free insurance, and free cash back. The retailer pays for this, but they don't give me a discount if I pay by debit card, so why should I?
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They don't? That's stupid of them. All my retailers charge 0.5% extra if you use a credit card instead of a debit card.
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The credit card companies are making money indirectly through my use of them, but on each individual purchase, I am paying the same _or less_ than if I were paying via cash or check, and it's more convenient than either. Of course I am counting cash back in that calculation.
They're paying *me* to get a free (interest wise) average 15 day loan of their money, since I pay in full every month. One of my cards did change back to having an annual fee in the past year or so, but IIRC when I figured it out at th
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can they get away with this? (Score:5, Interesting)
I smell some antitrust concern here...
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Your concerns are noted and ignored. The goverment would also like to know who is sending money to who. Since they can't know, they'll have no problem with extra being charged instead. For now. Eventually it will require disclosure of all paypal transactions.
The excuse trotted out will be one of... Drug dealers, Terrorists, Or tax evasion. Maybe all three.
Bet.
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There's things they LOVE to know about. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, they'd love to know about a lot of your spending. For instance:
- If you buy a gun: Then they'll know who to search if/when they decide to confiscate them.
- If you buy gold, silver, or other long-term store-of-value commodities: If/when the dollar weakens they can make those illegal to possess and confiscate them to try proping pu the failing dollar and heading off a competing currency, forcing people to stick with the printing-press fiat money. (They already did that with gold during the Great Depression.)
- If you buy a bunch of long-shelf-life food or other "survivalist" supplies. It's stuff to raid in a crisis and an indicator of who the non-sheep are.
- If you buy political literature of a non-mainstream nature.
I could go on for pages.
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Until you have *all* legal transactions monitored (or so class to all legal transactions as to make no difference), it's worthless for your scenarios. It's really easy to claim you resold something for cash or via paypal, or donated your campbell's tomato soup to a food drive instead of putting it in your crazy-man bunker. The exception is guns where legal transactions are already monitored, so resale is an admission of guilt anyway.
No idea who to root for in this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Paypal and Mastercard are both horrible companies. I suppose I should side with the company trying not to share my personal data, but Paypal is incredibly sleazy and dishonest in its own right.
Re:No idea who to root for in this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I could see MasterCard taking more of the hit for this though, Paypal funds can be added without any fee from a bank account, or with some new MoneyPak thing I'm just reading about for the first time - I forsee more people using this option if they have hefty fees when transferring from a credit card (Because the whole reason you're using Paypal is because you can't use your credit card in the first place, the money will be transferred if it has to be).
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GreenDot MoneyPaks cost $4.99 to purchase. You're much better off funding your PayPal account with an ACH transfer.
Re:No idea who to root for in this... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know! It's like watching two school bullies argues start to argue over something, as you're secretly hoping they'll get into a fight and both be suspended. I could see MasterCard taking more of the hit for this though, Paypal funds can be added without any fee from a bank account, or with some new MoneyPak thing I'm just reading about for the first time - I forsee more people using this option if they have hefty fees when transferring from a credit card (Because the whole reason you're using Paypal is because you can't use your credit card in the first place, the money will be transferred if it has to be).
There is no way on this earth I am giving Paypal my bank account number. They have a long an continuing history of tomfoolery regarding people's money. I need a way to dispute their withdrawals if needed, and with ACH, once the money is gone, it's gone. With a Visa or Mastercard, generally you can dispute it.
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The only reason PayPal exists is because some companies will only accept PayPal transactions, and because eBay strongarms sellers/buyers into accepting PayPal.
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Indeed. It is a little nice to see folks you don't like slug it out, and I dare say my opinion of Paypal almost went up slightly.
Still, we have to face that fact that in the end all this information is ending up in the same place. It's just a matter of who makes money selling it.
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It's yet another AvP situation: Whoever wins. We lose.
these are called 'downgrades' (Score:2)
... and I'm hardly surprised. Mastercard has a stick up it's ass lately about that kind of thing.
SLightly confusing summary (Score:2)
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Is there any source of what transactional data is shared
All of it.
Before the modern era of internet driven big data there were companies like Acxiom (est. 1969) aggregating data from credit cards, store cards, gas cards, telephone books(*), and whatever other consumer data they could get their hands on so it could be resold for market analysis.
If you use any form of electronic identification, they know what products you buy at which stores and at which time. This then is used to profile people so that companies like bulk mailers can target the wealthy, or the p
Re:SLightly confusing summary (Score:5, Interesting)
MasterCard already has access to personal data from the card issuing side (they can know everything your bank knows about you, which is considerably more than what a merchant might know). The issue here is that PayPal is acting as a screen so MasterCard/Visa cannot be sure of the nature of the downstream merchant (this is the data they are not getting from PayPal). This has monetary consequences for MasterCard because some of their fee structures [mastercard.com] differ by industry, but more significantly they track chargeback and loss rates by merchant industry. I think this is less about monetizing purchasing data (though there is certainly an element of that) and more about scaling their fee structure to known loss paterns.
Re:SLightly confusing summary (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this is less about monetizing purchasing data (though there is certainly an element of that) and more about scaling their fee structure to known loss paterns.
If that were the case, they could scale the PayPal fee structure according to the aggregate PayPall loss rate.
Nope. Looks to me like it's about profit from monitizing the customer data and trying to replace that revenue stream because they were unable to get the data from the PayPall transactions.
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If that were the case, they could scale the PayPal fee structure according to the aggregate PayPall loss rate.
This article is literally about scaling the PayPal fee structure. You can't just say "nope".
This woudl be ok, but... (Score:2)
The real question is not if Visa will follow Mastercard, but will American Express (the number 3 card) will follow Mastercard.
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"I would be fine with this except Visa and MasterCard are already acknowledged as a single Monopoly (see old American Express court battles). The fact that they will follow each. "
I guess, since PayPal is a bank registered in the EU, we will see a PayPal Credit Card Real Soon Now.
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PayPal have already tried the credit card thing, not that popular it seems.
That and they'd have to set up their own payment network to avoid MasterCard and VISA, or convince AMEX to carry them...
Re:This woudl be ok, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be fine with this except Visa and MasterCard are already acknowledged as a single Monopoly
And heaven forbid that the we regulate any monopoly or finance company in a meaningful way. Thanks to one of the most absurd SCOTUS decisions ever, they can charge interest rates that would embarrass Louie the Loanshark. Even worse may be the transaction fees, which even without the "special rates" for PayPal, etc. are something like 3%. Ask anybody with a small business that has to take CC's to stay in business, and see what they think of it. In organized crimes cases this is called skimming, but apparently it's ok if you're incorporated. In Australia the fees are regulated to 0.5%, and the credit card companies still do just fine down under.
Credit cards have ruined the value of money. (Score:2, Insightful)
Saving up to buy a nice widget used to mean something, now everyone just buys junk after junk with no planning, all while accruing enormous debt. This house of cards is just waiting for the right wind to knock it all down.
Quite frankly we deserve it.
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Who's 'we'? Certainly not the people who pay their bills on time.
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Crap ... (Score:4, Interesting)
So the company I won't do business with because I don't trust them is being sued by the companies I'm stuck with because the ones I won't do business with won't share enough of our data with them?
So, we're fucked then -- the megacorps have utterly won the privacy and financial data battle, the advertisers know everything you do because of it, Google and everybody else reads your email, and the government can collate the whole damned thing if they declare they Need To.
Dammit, the tinfoil isn't working any more. :-P
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Just pay cash for stuff.
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People STILL use CCs with PP? (Score:2)
Re:People STILL use CCs with PP? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your solution to your credit card number being vulnerable to theft is to give away your bank account number instead? Brilliant!
Re:People STILL use CCs with PP? (Score:4, Informative)
I think he's saying that he maintains two bank accounts, the one in which his paycheck gets deposited, and a separate, unconnected bank account he uses specifically for paypal. It's actually a pretty good strategy.
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He said it's a secondary bank account solely for sending money to PayPal, so he should be fine. Still, it's a massive overkill.
It's not overkill. It's just an especially thick firewall. It's close to the "air gap" level of unplugging the computer from all communication with the outside world (though it does have the connections of common ownership of the accounts and the record of transfers.)
Maxim 37: There is no 'overkill.' There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload".
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what if you don't use mastercard? (Score:2)
I'm not exactly sure how all this works, but when I buy stuff from paypal, I deposit directly from my credit union into the paypal account and then pay from there. To my knowledge, MC and Visa aren't involved at all. Unless there's something I'm not understanding?
Moreover, there's a way to use your bank's billpay feature to put money directly in your paypal account. Neither of these strategies appear to involve MC/Visa. Mind you, either of these strategies take time for the transfer, so you have to plan
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
"In Europe (at least in Belgium and the Netherlands and probably in other countries as well) VISA, MasterCard nor any other credit card company will know what you used your card for."
This is true for the most part in the U.S. too. With the exception of stuff like hotels & airlines where the CC company has a deal in place*, credit cards do not get line item details for the vast majority of transactions. There are tons of companies starting up right now to try and figure this out, however there are real t
Re: (Score:2)
In this case because they don't have much choice: the entire point of PayPal when it comes to credit-card payments is as an intermediary that companies who aren't directly registered with a CC merchant account can use to receive CC payments.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
It's not a human. It's a bot program written purely in hostfile.