Keep PayPal From Selling Your Personal Data to Advertisers

Back in September, PayPal announced the following amendment to their privacy statement:

We are updating our Privacy Statement to explain how, starting early Summer 2025, we will share information to help improve your shopping experience and make it more personalized for you. The key update to the Privacy Statement explains how we will share information with merchants to personalize your shopping experience and recommend our services to you. Personal information we disclose includes, for example, products, preferences, sizes, and styles we think you’ll like. Information gathered about you after the effective date of our updated Privacy Statement, November 27, 2024, will be shared with participating stores where you shop, unless you live in California, North Dakota, or Vermont. For PayPal customers in California, North Dakota, or Vermont, we’ll only share your information with those merchants if you tell us to do so. No matter where you live, you’ll always be able to exercise your right to opt out of this data sharing by updating your preference settings in your account under “Data and Privacy.”

Essentially, this means PayPal will use your transaction history to help merchants develop more targeted ads under the guise of “improving” and “personalizing” your shopping experience. This announcement coincides with PayPal’s recently launched advertising network, which is built on top of customer data and thus allows businesses to target people more accurately.

Fortunately, if you want to protect your own customer data, you can prevent this “personalized” experience by updating your PayPal account settings.

On the PayPal website:

1. Go to paypal.com and log into your account.
2. Click on the gear icon in the header to access your account profile.
3. Click on “Data & Privacy.”
4. Scroll down to the “Manage shared info” section and click on “Personalized shopping.”
5. Verify that “Let us share products, offers, and rewards you might like with participating stores” is toggled off. When you do that, you should see a “Sharing is off” message.

Or, in the PayPal app:

1. Launch the PayPal app on your device.
2. Tap your avatar in the upper-right corner to bring up your profile settings.
3. Tap “Data and privacy.”
4. Scroll down to the “Manage shared info” section and tap “Personalized shopping.”
5. Verify that “Let us share products, offers, and rewards you might like with participating stores” is toggled off. When you do that, you should see a “Sharing is off” message.

Always remember: When a website or platform offers you “personalized” service, the only way they can effectively do that is by leveraging your personal data, and specifically, your history of activity.

Depending on the website or platform, this history can include the pages you’ve visited (and how long/often you’ve visited them); your interactions with other users (and the users with whom you’ve interacted); the pictures and videos that you’ve looked at; the items that you’ve liked or shared; or, in PayPal’s case, your financial transactions.

Sometimes, this personalization can be useful and convenient, but never forget that it always comes at the cost of your privacy. Sometimes that cost might be worth it, but don’t ever assume that. And don’t ever allow online platforms to benefit from your personal data without doing your due diligence. You might just discover that they want to go further, and share more, than you’re comfortable with.