Paypal - To Do or Not To Do

[h8_Halifax]

Are you on paypal?
Did you receive some new "policy documents" recently?
Did Paypal send them to your To Do box?
Did you read them?
Did you try to acknowledge the changes?
Or just delete them from your To Do box?

But you couldn't ...

Apparently, Paypal say that there is no way to remove the Policy Documents from the To Do box ... but i don't need to read them each time i logon.
So what happens next time they update their policies?
Presumably they will update the Policy Document that is already in my To Do box.
However, from my perspective by then i will have probably learned to totally ignore my To Do box.
They say that when they next update their policies they will send an email but what if that's missed? What if it gets incorrectly filtered out as spam?

Could this mean that i might miss an important change in Paypal's policies?
Does it not seem rather stupid to ask people to ignore a potentially important source of information?

If i were into conspiracies i could have some very naughty thoughts about this issue.

[perplexity]

I'd never heard of paypal To Do box, and I have just logged onto a Paypal account and I don't see it.

Are we on the same page here, i.e. Paypal Europe?

[h8_Halifax]

i have uploaded a screenshot showing the ToDo section on paypal to the public area of my Dropbox.
here's the link:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4685544/ppal...%20Updates.png
it's a 50kb png file.

[perplexity]

Yes. Now I see.

It proves your point, I suppose: One habituates to taking no notice of a "policy update", not as if there were that much of a chance to change their mind about it.

It's all done on the silence denotes consent principle, so they have to go through the motions of informing members or else it would not be valid if subject to a legal challenge. which is not to suggest that anything that paypal does is legally valid. That would be the day.

[h8_Halifax]

so true!
just a pity that there's no "valid" alternatives.
nice to know that the spirit of competition still lives.

p.s.
you're no longer perplexed?

[perplexity]

A majority of sellers on the German version of eBay do not and will not use paypal.

They think it insane to pay a fee to accept a payment from a buyer, having thrived for so long already, online, with payments made by direct bank transfer, which is usually achieved within the Euro zone with no extra bank fee for particular payments. They succumb to Paypal only when they want to sell internationally, because eBay refuses to publish a seller's listings on the sites afflicted with Paypal if the seller is not set up to accept it.

How different it would be if Paypal had to survive on the strength of nothing more than it's supposed "protection" racket, without the support of eBay's compulsion. Were the buyers to be given the choice to pay the extra fee they would rather save the cost and were it not that eBay owns Paypal I dare say that eBay's current advice to buyers would be the same as it was before the acquisition of Paypal, to avoid the use.

[h8_Halifax]

yet it is such a really good idea, sending money to email addresses.

[sillygirl1]

This is along the lines of 'valid even if not read by you....'

I had a dodgy paypal message this morning, it was sent to completely the wrong email and told me that my account was full and I needed to transfer funds via a link... anyone else had that?

[h8_Halifax]

it's a known scam!
i've had very similar supposedly from various banks.
do NOT click that link.

[perplexity]

The very idea of paypal was indeed, precisely, to allow a buyer to send money online, to an email address, with nothing more than the email address to validate the fact that a paymnent is made, wherever the money would then end up.

A direct bank transfer, on the other hand, is impossible without the identification of the bank account to be sent to, which is in effect an absolute identification of the owner of that account, and the bank.

[h8_Halifax]

Originally Posted by perplexity

... the identification of the bank account to be sent to, which is in effect an absolute identification of the owner of that account, and the bank.

which is also all the 419 scammers ask for

[perplexity]

"ask for"?

The security of an online buyer depends upon the information that a seller provides.

[h8_Halifax]

Originally Posted by perplexity

"ask for"?.

The security of an online buyer depends upon the information that a seller provides.

?? you sure you got that right ??
so when i'm buying something, MY security depends on what the seller tells me?
has this possibly lost something in the translation?

[perplexity]

The security of an online transaction depends for instance on the application of section 7. of the Distance Selling Regulations: Information required prior to the conclusion of the contract, which includes for instance the requirement that a supplier informs that the right to cancel the contract exists, and with no obligation on the buyer's part to give a reason to cancel.

I don't know how the purpose of that could possibly be construed as anything other than to secure the buyer.

Conversely, the insecurity of an online buyer is almost entirely because of his own indolence, the wonder of the 419 scam being that information is provided. The scam would fail otherwise, except that false information is provided to bait the idiot, information which is fairly easily to check; all you have to do is google a few of the key words that appear as a part of a message. Unless it's an extraordinarily elaborate fraud, it should then be obvious enough that it is a scam.

[h8_Halifax]

except...
the first 419 i saw was in 1990/1991 in the form of a letter from a person who had been personally recommended by someone who runs [ran] my local post office.
none of the major banks; advice services; not even the local police knew ANYTHING about these scams. and the internet ...
it was only when i contacted citi bank (who the cheque was drawn on) and they threatened to have ME arrested for being in possession of a forged cheque that i knew my gut feeling had any foundation.

[perplexity]

What's the upshot of that then, except that you had the information that ought to suffice to check the credentials of an individual, a person who had been personally recommended by someone, but the check failed to happen?

It is ultimately a matter of trust. When we choose to trust or not to trust, it means that we accept a share of the responsibility for whatever comes of that.

[h8_Halifax]

check the post master? excellent credentials. everyone trusted him. yes, i trusted the post master because everyone else did. afterwards no-one believed me!
check someone in nigeria? well, not to trust them was certainly considered to be racist - that was made abundantly clear to me. yet doing any checks, you must be joking!
the police said they needed the bank to tell them that there had been a fraud.
the bank didn't want any publicity so they refused to do anything.
but me "accepting a share of the responsibility"
- do you honestly think that's so?

[perplexity]

That's what it means. to trust a person, that the remedy available is reduced to the extent that you trust the person.

If a likely lad steals a car and crashes it, that is the responsibility of the thief, so long as the car was locked. If the owner knowingly lent the car to a friend, or left it unlocked, it's another matter.