PayPal

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PayPal Holdings, Inc.

Basic information
Founded	1998
Legal structure	Public
Industry	Financial Technology
Official website	https://paypal.com/

PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers. It serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee.

Products and subsidiaries

• PayPal Honey
• Venmo

Controversies

Steam, 2025

PayPal does not allow purchasing of Steam Games for all currencies except USD, CAD, EUR, GBP, JPY and AUD. [Needs Citation]

Inactivity fee, 2022

PayPal charges inactivity fee in Canada and the EU.

If you don't log in or don't have transactions for a year you will be charged $20USD each year this is the case. Then when there are no more funds in the account they will close your account. If you have not logged in how can they assume you have seen the changed terms and tacitly agree to the changes and thus the fees.

Transaction fee refunds, 2019

PayPal will no longer refund transaction fees on refunds PayPal announced they would undo this policy change, and then a few months later re-implemented it.

Privacy

In 2018, the introduction of the GDPR in Europe forced PayPal to disclose a list of third party companies they share user data with. The list includes over 600 different companies, from fraud prevention to analytics, tracking and advertising companies.

Alternatives

Unfortunately, no truly privacy friendly digital payment systems are in wide-spread use at the time of writing.

The GNU Taler project is a very promising recent option that allows for completely anonymous digital purchases while still relying on common currencies and preventing money laundering and tax fraud, all with minimal to no transaction fees. It is currently available in Switzerland with Germany scheduled to follow later in 2025.

Of the more universally available commercial payment methods, Apple Pay is among the most private, but requires the user to own an Apple device and to trust Apple Inc not to collect more data than they disclose.