A Notice regarding Privacy Violations of Customers of Paypal
Paypal is now automatically sharing personal data about you with participating stores
I find violations of privacy like this absolutely disgusting, so I want to send out a warning. If you have a PayPal account (if you do, you'll have gotten an email from PayPal recently about "upcoming changes to our legal agreements"), this affects you. Beginning on November 27, 2024, Paypal is going to start handing out your data, for free, to any store that asks for it. Your data about what you buy. Maybe it's medicine, or equipment for managing a disability. Maybe it's gay pride merchandise. Maybe it's pregnancy tests, tickets to a political event, payments to a dating app — anything that can be used to profile you can and will be used to profile you.
We shouldn't live in a world where our data is bought and sold — or in this case given away freely. Privacy is *the bedrock of a free society. Imagine that you're a woman living in a red state. Imagine that you're pregnant. Roe v. Wade has been overturned. In Texas, there is a literal bounty placed on not just women seeking an abortion, and not just doctors that provide it, but any person who helps that woman get to a different state to have a safe abortion. Now imagine how interested this government will be in knowing how many pregnant women there are in the state, and who they are specifically, so it can see which ones of them suddenly stop being pregnant without giving birth. Did they… have an abortion? All of a sudden, abortion is a crime, and if the government has enough information to profile its residents on who's pregnant and who's not, life gets very dangerous for women. All women. Even ones who suffer miscarriages, even ones who were never pregnant at all, because everyone is under scrutiny of being a possible criminal.
This is one example of a nightmare scenario that many of us already live in, because of how privacy in the United States has been eroded over the years. Sensitive data – about who is pregnant, who is no longer pregnant, who's gay, who has what medical condition – can all be reconstructed based on data about things like your purchasing history.
You might say, "I don't really care if corporations know everything about me." Do you care if the government knows everything about you? (Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist.) Because it's such a simple, small step for corporations that have all this personal, sensitive data about you to hand it over to the government as soon as it asks. And if you still don't feel like you're vulnerable, imagine that you're that woman living in a red state. Imagine that you're pregnant. And this doesn't even have to be about abortion. Imagine that you simply had a miscarriage. And in the wake of this personal tragedy, this deep trauma, you find yourself under investigation, under scrutiny, from the government, since your data indicates that you might be a criminal.
People suffer under a lack of privacy. It is always the most vulnerable people that suffer the most.
So please. Go into your settings, click on Data and Privacy, and toggle off the "Personalized Shopping" feature, which is what they're calling this awful tool.
Thank you.