Recently PayPal hit the media with stories about how they want to bombard you with marketing spam texts and calls from autodialers. Now they’ve admitted that their language was open to misinterpretation, issued an apology for not communicating clearly and further clarification of their intent.
PayPal say that the language caused confusion and concern for which they apologise and are modifying their user agreement to make clearer exactly what type of calls users might expect to receive.
Basically PayPal want to use autobots to dial you when for instance unexpected transactions appear on your account. My bank (Barclays) already does this and simply ask me to confirm the transactions before any more activity occurs on my bank. It’s to protect me from potentially losing all my money to fraudsters and it’s in similar circumstances PayPal want to autodial customers.
PayPal have specifically said in the amendments “We will not use autodialed or prerecorded calls or texts to contact our customers for marketing purposes without prior express written consent”, as well as making it clear that you can opt out of any calls at all if you so wish. You can read the whole announcement on the PayPal stories website.
Edited to add:
PayPal have asked us to emphasise that “This is related to the U.S. amendments to the PayPal U.S. User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Acceptable Use Policy. This does not apply in the UK. However, in either region, PayPal will honour any customers’ requests to decline to receive marketing outreach over the phone, SMS or email. Privacy is central to the trusted relationship we have with our customers and we take this very seriously.”
