“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.
I’m so over this. So exasperated by it. Every company in a scramble to the bottom. Meanwhile my country’s reporting a downturn in FOOD spending because people are fucking poor.
We’re being bombarded with ads at every turn, having our data sold off, stolen, or repurposed for LLMs… Meanwhile the customer experience gets worse and worse.
I work in digital ux and honestly, I just want to unplug and go live in a cave.
Been interested in computers since childhood, and have been working in the IT industry for over a decade now.
I would love to take a sledgehammer to all of my stupid customer’s servers and go live on a farm. The future we made for ourselves is fucking retarded.
We? No. I didn’t participate in the building of this future.
The sad thing is that even if you really wanted to go off the grid, live in a cave, and rediscover the fire, you wouldn’t be allowed to.