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PayPal will use your purchase information and shopping patterns to sell targeted ads (www.theverge.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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“If you’re someone who’s buying products on the web, we know who is buying the products where, and we can leverage the data,” Grether said in a statement to the WSJ. He also said that PayPal will receive shopping data from customers using its credit card in stores.

A PayPal spokesperson tells the WSJ that the company will collect data from customers by default while also offering the ability to opt out.

PayPal is far from the only company to sell ads based on transaction information. In January, a study from Consumer Reports revealed that Facebook gets information about users from thousands of different companies, including retailers like Walmart and Amazon. JPMorgan Chase also announced that it’s creating an ad network based on customer spending data, while Visa is making similar moves. Of course, this doesn’t include the tracking shopping apps do to log your offline purchases, too.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you are comfortable with PayPal you can buy crypto from them afaik, though I am fairly sure you will have to provide additional KYC info than name and credit card, most of the cryptocurrency community obviously hates KYC and there would absolutely be centralized non-KYC options for buying crypto if it wasn't blatantly illegal to offer that.

isn’t Coinbase custodial? I will not use custodial exchanges

That's totally fair but consider that if your intention is to purchase crypto and immediately withdraw it to a personal wallet, there are zero practical drawbacks to an exchange being custodial because they are only holding your crypto in custody for the brief period of time between when you click the buy button and when you click the withdraw button. A DEX with escrow is going to be less custodial than that, but I would call it still a little bit custodial, since even if the escrow person doesn't have the option to take your crypto for themselves they could still potentially collude with the seller and send it back to them, which means there is a brief window when the crypto you have purchased is not truly under your personal control. You can have a crypto to crypto dex be perfectly non-custodial (ie. Uniswap), but you can't have a fiat to crypto exchange be perfectly non-custodial.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The problem with buying crypto in PayPal is that, last I checked, you can't withdraw it from their ecosystem. I'm not interested in crypto for investment or whatever, I just want to regain some control over my finances. I mostly use cash for everything (part of why I buy in person as much as possible) so I have more control than some but fiat is still largely worthless compared to Bitcoin and other non-gimmick coins.

So, you're saying that if I use Coinbase, I could withdraw the keys and have full custody over it after I buy it? Then where's the custodial catch that I always hear about with Coinbase?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

you can’t withdraw it from their ecosystem

They changed that a while ago

So, you’re saying that if I use Coinbase, I could withdraw the keys and have full custody over it after I buy it? Then where’s the custodial catch that I always hear about with Coinbase?

Yes. Idk what specific criticisms you're referring to but probably just related to how it is a centralized exchange, which does have some genuine drawbacks like reduced privacy, for instance they don't sell Monero or other privacy coins. The reason I also mentioned Kraken is that it is the only fiat gateway exchange that does sell Monero, with other ones if you want to be private you would have to first buy some non-private crypto, then send to a crypto to crypto exchange to buy a privacy coin and go from there. Also there are a lot of people that just buy crypto on Coinbase and never withdraw it, so for them it's custodial all the way.