I have just been reading the news here in the UK and I noticed something that will certainly be of interest to Paypal users in the USA. If it happens in the US then I am pretty sure it will come to the UK eventually too!

If you have a Paypal account then you will know that you don’t get much in the way of advertising or marketing emails. Well this is about to change big time!

Paypal have announced that from July this year, for the US, they are changing their terms and conditions to so that account users will now receive automated marketing email plus texts and calls to any phone number that you have provided in your account!

Not only that, you will also ‘agree’ to them giving your details to their affiliates so that they can send you automated marketing calls as well!

This is of course nothing new. There are plenty of companies that do this and hand out our details to other companies. If you read the small print you will notice that this goes on a lot.

In fact just recently my husband purchased a business book and signed up to receive their newsletter only to discover that he started receiving other emails from people he had never heard of! After doing some investigating he found out that hidden in the small print, there was information to state that by signing up to one newsletter he was agreeing to give them permission to hand his email address over to other newsletters. Then there was a sentence to say that if he didn’t want this to happen he needed to email them to state as much!

He did this and voiced his annoyance at not being told upfront about this. They removed him from the other newsletters with no apology and said that it was written in their terms that were on the sign up webpage.

Sneeky Terms & Conditions

I think this is wrong! Surely this should be made much more visible. I’m surprised that our data protection laws have nothing to say about this.

Anyway back to Paypal.

What can you do about it?

Well, it seems that you can opt out of receiving automated marketing but the place to do this is not easy to spot! Surprise surprise!

You won’t find it on the terms & conditions page. I don’t think you will find it in the email you receive from Paypal requesting that you agree to their updated policy either!

According to a Paypal spokesman (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33009774) you should go to settings within your account and then click to stop receive notifications.

My immediate question is “does that mean all notifications – even regarding security issues?” I would hope that important messages are still sent.

Where Are the Settings?

I went into my Paypal account and the settings feature is found when you click on profile. Then I needed to go to Account Settings and then find Communication preferences.

There I was able to check or uncheck a variety of communications.

I shall be keeping a look out to see if this changes for the UK. For those in the US, you might want to go into your settings after July and sort out what your communication preferences will be!