from Hacker News

PayPal is planning an ad business using data on its shoppers

by notrealyme123 on 5/28/24, 3:01 PM with 30 comments

• by violet13 on 5/28/24, 5:12 PM

  Before you say "another reason to stop using Paypal", keep in mind that credit card companies routinely share purchase data with online advertising companies. This is so that Google and others can tie online impressions to brick-and-mortar purchases, among other things.

  Paypal is playing catch-up.

• by JohnFen on 5/28/24, 5:10 PM

  PayPal is the last of my "dirty internet habits" that I've been whittling down. I think this provides me with more than enough motivation to finally get rid of it entirely.

• by giancarlostoro on 5/28/24, 5:08 PM

  I guess they get to squeeze more money out of my transactions. I miss the days of boring ads that were contextual on the site you were on and not trying to pry into my life in creepy ways.

• by throwaway42668 on 5/28/24, 5:56 PM

  Ugh. Increasingly what bothers me about stuff like this is that we’re endlessly organizing more and more and more of our economic activity around marketing and advertising, and it chokes off the air-supply for so many other business models, products, and innovation pursuits.

  The data privacy part? Sure, that’s annoying and troublesome, but God help me… can there be more of a point to everything than targeting & delivering ads? It’s just depressing.

• by snowpid on 5/28/24, 5:46 PM

  Very typical for a American company to just assume their non American customer are equal to their American counterparts (+ regulation etc.)

• by knoebber on 5/28/24, 5:33 PM

  I’m surprised they weren’t doing this already . This is standard for CC companies afaik.