How PayPal Shares Your Data | Hacker News Reader

How PayPal Shares Your Data

rebecca-ricks.com

158 pointscstanley43 comments

Just skip this terrible usability nightmare and read the original list instead at [1]. FWIW, I used Ctrl+F to search around (for, in my case, my country name).

And the 100 dollar question: is this better or worse than an average bank from your_country? I have no clue about my own bank. Reading through this list, it seems I should get a clue about my own bank.

[1] https://www.paypal.com/ie/webapps/mpp/ua/third-parties-list

And then what? You find they are doing almost the same, move to the biggest forrest you can find and start living on berries and rabbits? Or you decide to cut 1/3 of your savings, buy paypal and show them how to do it the right way?

It's really hard to see any reasonable options you have as source of data.

Some cryptocurrencies are designed to preserve privacy, to protect people from exactly this problem.

I don't think cryptocurrencies are protecting anyone from any problem.

OK, I'll bite. How is Monero not protecting people's privacy?

Because most Monero transactions are traceable, according to research by the National University of Singapore:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/338.pdf

If anyone can debunk this I’d love to hear more, but generally I think it’s dangerous to rely on claims of secrecy

https://getmonero.org/2017/04/19/an-unofficial-response-to-a...

Thanks for the link. While it’s good to see the paper overstates the problem, it’s also clear that users should not assume that their Monero transactions are untraceable.

I think the summary of both papers (the initial paper and monero's unofficial response) could be that monero's transactions are reasonably untraceable.

Reasonably private should be good enough for most people.

If the goal is more-private-than-bitcoin, yes, it's less traceable than bitcoin. If the goal is bulletproof-from-authorities, not so much.

Yes, a known example is Monero. The question is, first and foremost, if you should trust cryptocurrencies.

You don't, that's the point. It's an investment of time and money to learn the tech so you don't need to trust it.

Trustlessness, in other words the property of not requiring trust in the ledger's correctness, is the cornerstone of cryptocurrencies.

Yeah, but the biggest ones are not inflationary, so they end up as exclusively hype-driven speculative investment vehicles. That's not good for a method of payment.

Monero is inflationary, but it still might not keep up with coin loss.

Even a coin with higher inflation will still be susceptible as a speculative-investment. It would be nice if there was a way to avoid that, and to keep value relatively-stable, but I can't think of anyway that does require trusting 3rd parties.

Typo, meant: "that does not require"

Preserving privacy by having a public ledger where everyone can see your transactions?

Basically every time I can pay with PayPal I can also pay with iDEAL (local equiv. of IBAN / bank transfer). PayPal just works quicker. It wouldn't surprise me if my current bank (Rabobank) did the same but then I can compare it with other banks available in my country and consider to (finally) make the switch because I've been considering to switch banks for quite some while (one of my options is Triodos [1] who resort to ethical banking / investments). I also want to start a savings account for my child for later. YMMV.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triodos_Bank

This right here is the reason we need cryptocurrency. Not for speculation, not as a "settlement layer", just for unfettered global economic activity accessible to normal people.

What could possibly go wrong!

I just recently opened a new checking account with Chase and, upon reading the terms, found they do exactly this. All banks do...its why (at least for me) we get so many offers on a daily basis. I really wish it werent the case.

Worse obviously. PayPal is a US company, US consumer rights and privacy policies are always worse. That's a given.

PayPal it's just another Luxembourg bank for EU citizens

The tree visualization was kind of cool, so I turned it into a library called d4tree.

https://github.com/shawwn/d4tree

Throw it any JSON data whose structure is isomorphic to http://rebecca-ricks.com/paypal-data/data/paypal.json

Here's an example of how to use d4tree on your site:

https://github.com/shawwn/d4tree-paypal

  git clone https://github.com/shawwn/d4tree-paypal
  cd d4tree-paypal
  yarn && yarn dev

Make any changes you want to paypal.json, then refresh http://localhost:1234 to see them. Whenever you're happy, run `yarn deploy` to push it live.

Standard paypal visualization:

https://dist-zlomdidehn.now.sh/

After truncating paypal.json to three nodes, we get a skinny tree:

https://dist-kzpulmmevd.now.sh/

Let's attach package.json to the top of paypal.json:

  import d4tree from 'd4tree';
  d4tree([{
      name: "package.json",
      parent: "null",
      children: require('./paypal.json'),
      Data: JSON.stringify(require('./package.json'), true, 2),
  }]);

https://dist-vcqquyfbwl.now.sh

https://imgur.com/a/arwF5

Do you realise that this is essentialy Mike Bostock's reference implementation of a Collapsible Tree [1]?

Why re-distribute it as a separate repository?

Rebeca Ricks added tooltips, but you haven't generalised these: the code in your repo still generates this text using .Data and .Purpose attributes of the data objects representing the leaves [2], which won't exist for general tree objects.

[1]: https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4339083

[2]: https://github.com/shawwn/d4tree/blob/master/js/script.js#L7...

http://9front.org/img/freesoftware.gif

Thanks! :) I did this mostly for the fun of it, but it's nice to know the source. The styling on Mike's tree is much nicer.

It's quite handy to have zooming and tooltips. The zooming is a little rough, but overall this seems like a nice way to explore huge amounts of hierarchical data.

My overall aim is to make an interactive bundle explorer:

https://i.imgur.com/Ww0ARCS.png

Graphviz is nice, but it's not interactive. What you really want is to attach a ton of information to each node, hidden by default. Tooltips are a small but promising step towards that.

It doesn't seem like this library can handle circular dependencies though. Anyone know of something along these lines that can handle arbitrary cycles?

DOT graphs try to display all the nodes at once, but it seems like the Collapsible Tree strategy could be applied to circular graphs: just let the user click on the edges they want to explore, and elide the rest. Then indicate which edges are "interesting" (lots of children, or children with significant effects), so that users aren't randomly stepping through a huge mostly-hidden graph.

I'd love to find something performant enough to display your entire filesystem as an explorable tree, but that'd be quite a challenge.

this is actually worse than the source. for whatever reason, the chart appears super zoomed out for me, so the text is tiny. but even if there wasn't a font issue, the source is already clear as it is that a flowchart style diagram isn't going to help.

And it's an SVG (embedded) to boot so there's no real way for most people to grab the source file and upsize it (where possible).

EDIT: Also, I realize there are some relatively simple and quick solutions to this, but it's definitely way more steps / requires more specific software and/or knowledge to execute as simply as right clicking an image on a website, clicking inspect element, locating the line of code with the image source, downloading and going from there / modifying code to meet needs.

Understanding privacy policies and terms of service has become a nightmare. I wish there was a standard privacy format, which companies could use to define and update their privacy policies. That way, it ll be easier for people to understand

1. What personal data is being used ?

2. What kind of data do websites store in your browser cookie ?

3. Which are the 3rd party tools / services used to share data ?

4. Who are the 3rd parties, the data is being shared with.

This interface is incredibly hard for me to use. I'm having to do a lot of scrollbar fighting and I can't figure out how to see the nodes beyond the edge of the frame.

With a json viewer chrome extension

(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-viewer/gbmdgp...)

this is much easier to read:

http://rebecca-ricks.com/paypal-data/data/paypal.json

On the other hand, Firefox seems to have such feature built-in.

Maybe of interest: https://www.whotracks.me/ - A growing list of profiles on trackers and tracking landscape on popular domains.

Huh, what is the CCC doing in there? The Chaos Computer Club, largest hacker club of Europe, organizer of the Chaos Community Congress that attracts some 15 000 hackers every year?

They're filed under customer support outsourcing with the "explanation":

> Global Ops Customer service outsourcing for the German market.

> Full Name, Date of Birth, Email address, Physical address, Telephone number, Financials-bank, debit, and credit, Transaction history, Business details including URLs, SSN/TIN/EIN, IP Address. Counterparty details.

I would be amused to find out it's a PoC to demonstrate what it takes to sucker a company into handing over the data.

That's probably the callcenter company CCC, which is unrelated to them. https://www.yourccc.com/

Ah right, that makes sense. Thanks!

A list-based would probably just fine... as the user interface...

Cool idea but on Firefox Focus on Android, it is almost unusable.

firefox on desktop is also unusable really

Working fine on Linux with Firefox Nightly here.

If I zoom in enough to have readable text, the branches below the middle are unreachable via scrolling (Safari). Something is very broken with this presentation.

something like workflowy or coggle would work much better for this type of thing

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