How annoying is this? Paypal sends ads on numbers it otherwise obtained.
Be careful when you sign PayPal’s soon-to-be-updated user agreement: new wording in the document means the company could soon be able to make phone calls and send text messages to numbers of yours that you didn’t give them. As noted by The Washington Post, the new agreement updates a clause that means PayPal can now contact you with “autodialed or prerecorded calls and text messages,” on numbers the company has “otherwise obtained” from other sources.
While the new agreement sounds invasive, it should be noted that under the current document, PayPal could also technically obtain numbers from various sources. The existing agreement specifies that the ways users provided a telephone number “include, but are not limited to” providing a telephone number at account opening, adding a telephone number to your account later, giving it to an employee, or by using it to call PayPal. The new document expands on these specific examples, making it clear the company can also draw numbers from data lists and match them to users. [continue]
This is not how to win friends and influence people, Paypal.
This reminds me to mention two things you might like.
- Paranoid Paul is a free privacy policy tracking tool; it will give you the heads-up on policy changes for sites you’ve said that you use.
- You get unwanted phone calls or text messages? Get some software to block that, kids, and that’s the end of that problem.