PayPal shares your purchases with advertisers – here’s how to stop that!

The change to the PayPal User Agreement that allows this is enabled by default. This is what you need to do to prevent it.

PayPal shares your purchases with advertisers

Once again, an online service is quietly changing its data collection and sharing policies. This time it’s PayPal. The good news is that you have until November 27 to opt out before your information is automatically passed on without your consent.

According to the page with policy updates from PayPal (released on September 23), the service plans to exchange your data with third-party merchants to improve and personalize your shopping experience. This should happen from the beginning of summer 2025. But PayPal will start collecting data as early as November 27, 2024. The option is also enabled by default.

This is how you disable the option

To disable the option, proceed as follows:

You will see two options here, namely ‘Interest-based marketing on PayPal’ and ‘Interest-based marketing on your other accounts’. You must open both of these options and then disable them. You can only do this one at a time.

PayPal is not the first

PayPal isn’t the first online service to quietly add policies without asking users for permission. That’s how it started LinkedIn recently training an AI tool on user data. Again, users had to opt out of this functionality to prevent their personal data and posts from being collected.

Previously, Facebook, Instagram and PayPal will probably not be the last service to do this, so it is important to keep an eye on this development.