Your buying history may give away a lot more than you realise it does. Payment companies use this information about your shopping behaviours and preferences to create targeted ads and marketing suggestions for you based on both your previous purchases and how you paid.
PayPal provides customizable advertising options based on your usage of PayPal, your buying habits, and any other profile information they may have on file about you. This means that if you do not want your buying activity used to advertise to you or shared with any advertising partners, you can easily turn off these advertising settings.
The good thing is that it only takes a few steps.
Why You Should Turn This Off
PayPal uses certain account and activity information to show personalised offers and ads. That can include:
- Your purchase activity
- App usage behaviour
- Profile information
- Shopping preferences
Some users are fine with personalised ads, while others prefer keeping financial activity more private.
If privacy matters to you, disabling these settings is worth doing.
How to Stop PayPal From Sharing Your Purchase Data
Step 1: Log in to your PayPal account
Step 2: Go to Settings
Step 3: Then Go to Data and Privacy
Step 4: Tap on Personalised Offers and Ads
Step 5: Turn off Both Advertising Options (Personalised offers from us and Personalised ads from our ad partners)
What happens after disabling it?
Turning these settings off means PayPal should stop using your purchase activity and account behaviour for personalised advertising purposes.
You may still see general ads or offers, but they should no longer be based on your shopping habits or transaction history.
PayPal History
PayPal was formed in 1998 through the merger of Confinity, developed by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek, and X.com, an online bank developed by Elon Musk. Confinity started as a company which developed transaction software for small portable devices like Palm Pilots, until they pivoted their product line to focus on developing a digital wallet to allow for fast, secure electronic transactions between users. This was an innovative idea at that time!
After merging with X.com, Confinity was able to experience tremendous growth and rapidly gained popularity amongst eBay users (both buyers and sellers) who needed a fast, secure way to make transactions on the eBay platform. Before the launch of PayPal, people used to send paper checks or money orders via the mail in order to make transactions. Therefore, due to the speed with which transactions could be completed using PayPal, eBay acquired PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
For the next 13 years, PayPal operated as a part of eBay, expanding into different countries and adding new features like mobile payments. During this time, the founders and early employees, often called the “PayPal Mafia”, left to start other famous companies like Tesla, YouTube, and LinkedIn. In 2015, PayPal split away from eBay to become its own independent company again, allowing it to partner with other shopping sites and focus on new technologies.
In finance, it is one of the largest international names today. It has also acquired many other leading services, including those of Venmo and Honey, and now supports many offerings, including cryptocurrency and many new buy now, pay later options.
What began as a means for sending money electronically between Palm Pilots has become an international payment system that enables millions of individuals and merchants to pay and receive payments as well as run their business.
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