PayPal Dumped Cloud Company After It Refused To Monitor Customers' Files (fortune.com)
German Dropbox rival Seafile claims PayPal dropped it as a customer after it refused to comply with the payment services company's demand to spy on its users' data. In a blog post, the company informed its customers that they can no longer pay for the service using PayPal -- the only payment method that Seafile currently relies on. CEO Silja Jackson told Fortune, "We're looking into alternative payment services, but currently we're running a cloud service and not getting paid." Founded in 2009, Seafile has over 250,000 users, many in universities. The service offers an open-source file-synchronization system that organizations can install on their own servers -- for a fee, if they want enterprise features -- and last October the firm decided to also start offering a paid version that's hosted on Seafile's German servers, for individuals and small businesses.
Nothing of substance has changed at PayPal since the old days. Check.
#DeleteChrome
All the strong-arm authoritarianism, none of the democratic illusions of choice!
Paypal officially fell into a black hole as viewed from my frame of reference a year ago.
PayPal Will Be Able To Robo-Text/Call Users With No Opt-out Starting July 1
All this shit they still do at this point amounts to Hawking radiation.
If your sole payment method was PayPal, I'm not sure I trust you with my data.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I thought Safe Harbor was overturned by the EU specifically to prevent this type of abuse.. and now we have Privacy Shield coming [specifics tbd] to which I would think Paypal must also adhere. They clearly intend no such adherence.
Makes me wonder what other cloud storage providers didn't say no.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Issues with Paypal's policies aside, this is what can happen when you don't diversify your payment processing. If your one vendor dumps you, you're boned.
It's forgivable during the startup phase, but c'mon, you've been around since 2009 and have a claimed 250K users.
Paypal has been doing this for a long time.
Please clarify - which candidate? I can't tell which of six you're referring to.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I could see this as a potentially good thing. It's down a bit now, but that may be allowing more people to use the service and spreading its use (more people accepting it means more places it can be spent).
I initially thought the summary meant PayPal wanted access to the customer data, but the story told me they just wanted analytics showing the file sharing website was attempting to combat copyright infringement.
I still side with seafile, but that's not nearly as douchey as I interpreted the summary.
...people still use PayPal?!? Who knew? Or cared? Them and Ebay, they're like the rummage sell of the Internet. (...Caveat emptor)
http://arstechnica.com/busines...
- needs a shrink or detox, probably busloads of people all over the planet!
Ever heard of
"Hypercapitalism and Digitization,
the total exploitation of humans...."
Milking and classifying every human for profit.
Acxiom - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
PayPal's philosophy is big part of that religion..
Wow... So, file-sharing is wrong and "out of China" is an aggravating circumstance.
And I read it on Slashdot, where people used to scream and fight anything suggesting that. And where referring to "out of $country" used to be a sign of "racism"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Wow, Paypal might not have changed much, but maybe Slashdot is starting to change. I've been modded down in the past for suggesting that Paypal and the electronic bay of thieves were evil, apparently by people who like to use them and don't want to consider the moral implications. Now it comes out that Paypal, a private company, is trying to get access to files that I store on a German server (obviously I don't really, since I absolutely will never use Paypal), based on nothing more than the account was paid for through Paypal.
I'm shocked! Shocked that Slashdot users might finally be waking up to some of the abuses of this company!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
PayPal is a bad idea even for a simplistic personal transaction. But what "organization" uses PayPal of all things? It's absurd. If they can't handle a credit card transaction then they shouldn't be an online business. I can just see someone from IT shouting over the top of the cubicle, "Hey, anyone have the PayPal password so I can renew our cloud?"
Recently so many people are taking spying/data collection to a whole new level including the dreaded MS. And the government benefits so they won't add policies to control them themselves unless there is a big public stink.It's unfortunate that Snowden's effort didn't get more public reaction. It's nice to see some companies trying to do the right thing. Be nice to use them to keep others in the industry honest. what about GoogleWallet or Authorize.net?
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Government Left Hand: You damned well better make sure you are not knowingly an illegal file sharing service!
Government Right Hand: You damned well better not be spying on your customers' stuff!
What porn is it when someone takes it from both ends simultaneously?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Why was this voted "informative"? This comment is meant sarcastic, if you only read the article.
Seafile offers software that allows you to operate a private service akin to Dropbox. They are open source, so they have source packages as well as precompiled versions of their server and client for download. Their business model consists of offering a version of their software with additional features that costs money. They also offer paid support.
The German company by a similar name (Seafile GmbH in Germany vs. Seafile Ltd. out of China) started offering space on Seafile servers operated by themselves last year.
Spying on their users is not only impractical, since the client offers encryption, but also illegal in Germany, where the servers are located.
Like Dopbox, Google Drive and similar services, Seafile offers file sharing via a web link, of course, which makes illegal file sharing possible, but also pretty dumb, since German law has legal options to force Seafile to divulge the identity (only paying customers, remember?) of someone providing a link to a file on the server space they rented, if the file contents are illegal in some way.
So why the "Informative" tag on something so entirely misleading?
'Ferocity'.
You clearly define that differently than I do.
Hillary defines 'them' mostly as Bernie does. Two for one there. The who should be obvious by now, but for clarification, I am one of 'them'.
Johnson seems to define 'them' as other politicians and their lackeys. He may be a poet in hiding. He seems sincere, but don't they all?
Cruz defined 'them' as Democrats and their sponsors, I think. He neglected the leadership of his own party, largely to his detriment.
Trump of course changes his definition to fit the occasion. This is either pandering or opportunism, with a healthy dose of carnival barker thrown in. The rest should be paying attention to his tactics. Hillary would have to change very little to be like Trump. Bernie, well, tougher. Johnson is not playing the same game, so he isn't losing, he's just irrelevant. For now. Nothing is certain yet.
The rest of the Republican elves could not distinguish themselves, and no longer get my words beyond dismissal.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Wait, is this the same PayPal that is owned by EBay, the company that has for years refused to do anything about the selling of copyright infringing software through their site, instead offering an "official" complaint system which is just completely ignored, and continues to do nothing about it to this day? Are they afraid of a little competition?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The time has come.
By that logic, pointing out, that welcoming refugees from countries with a comparably flagrant disregard for women's rights may not be smart, is Ok too.
And yet, Donald Trump, who suggested a freeze of such immigrations, was widely denounced as just that — a racist everywhere, Slashdot included... But bashing the entire China is Ok?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And, it looks like alternatives might be SofortÃoeberweisung or Giropay, but they apparently don't interact with Deutsche Bank, which seems the only German bank allowing retail USA customers. However, Deutsche Postbank owns BHF (USA) Holdings Inc. since 2001. Perhaps they could use this to provide some retail customers access to these payment services. It's a sure bet that Paypal could use some competition.
PayPal is much more than just peer-to-peer transactions. They offer businesses a credit card processing service called PayFlow, which is used by many large tech companies to collect customer payments. It's really not that unusual for merchants to have only one credit card processor.
As a German company, it should be very easy for them to handle payments by all European customers as standard SEPA bank transfers. The commission should be lower, and the money arrives the next day at the latest.
My emphasis. Paypal do not say who's laws they are enforcing, I suspect that they are talking about the laws of the USA; they are not interested that their (Paypal's) customers might have to obey different laws. Paypal might even be obliged to demand that their customer obey laws of the USA regardless of which jurisdiction their customer is subject to. For all we know Paypal might have received a NSL (National Security Letter) as the FBI/NSA/... is interested in some of Seafile's customers -- we will never know.
I have never given PP my bank info. I only use them for making payments, and the charges are made against a CC.
Idiot AC. From the info posted on the website Paypal not only wanted the files monitored (a violation of EU laws) but also demanded a list of file types that the user was saving on the system. What the hell does Paypal need to know if I'm saving pictures in .JPG or .RAW format for? What bad thing is ging to happen if Paypak decides that I'm saving files of the "wrong type"?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.