PayPal Robbed Me

This morning, I tried adding a new MasterCard debit card to my PayPal account. PayPal rejected the card — ten times. Unbeknownst to me, and as my bank would inform me later this morning, PayPal charged that same card PhP 45.16 each time. I lost PhP 451.60 (roughly $10) to PayPal even though their site repeatedly “rejected” my new debit card. If they rejected it, why did they keep successfully charging it?

PayPal’s longtime monopoly on online payment has made them both arrogant and complacent. I am only too happy to watch their monopoly fall in the face of big new competitors like Google Checkout and Amazon FPS.

I’ve pulled all my credit cards out of my PayPal account. I am never doing business with PayPal again.

Update, August 14, 9:32 AM GMT+8: PayPal just emailed. They promise to remove the charges in a few days. Let’s wait and see if they make good on that promise.

Google Search Privacy Explained

The Googleplex has no shortage of smart attractive Asian women, so I’m not surprised they’d send rising star support engineer Maile Ohye to explain Google search privacy. She even draws a chart. Oh ye.

In a feisty jab at competitors, Maile points out that Google is the first search engine to employ these privacy measures, despite those competitors taking no heat at all from privacy groups. I guess gods get held to higher standards.