I imagine Paypal freezes quite a few accounts every day. I respect them more for treating it as business as usual, and not necessarily caving to internet pressure. They are a company dealing with financial transactions, and them screwing up is not just a matter of someone not getting funding, it can be a matter of many people being the victims of fraud. As long as they have reasons for their actions, and they are in line with their published policies, and they attempt to rectify problems quickly when they occur (apparently within a single day in this case), I see no reason they should be putting out a PR response to everyone who cries foul.

The "have you government approval to encrypt emails" [1] question was not necessary through. They did not even specified which government they mean.

[1] https://protonmail.ch/blog/paypal-freezes-protonmail-campaig...

People (not just HN commenters) hate paypal because of a bad reputation that it earned over a long period of time for having horrible customer service, making opaque, terrible decisions that affect people financially, having a terrible UI, and maintaining a monopoly position for largely legislative and legacy reasons. It's fairly common for people to have a personal story about how paypal screwed them, rather than hearsay.

Honestly, I think they've improved vastly on most of this since, but their bad reputation is entirely deserved.

I have a strong dislike of Paypal, but it's warranted. Not over things like this (I had my own donation account locked once, and a quick email exchange got it unlocked with no problems).

I used paypal because I thought it provided me some protection.

I purchased web hosting using my paypal account. Then one day, the company doing the hosting folded up and disappeared. Since I had just prepaid a month of service, I filed a claim with paypal for services not received.

12 hours later, they had completed their research and determined that they would not proceed to charge this back against the merchant. No further details provided to me, and case was closed.

It seems to me that if a company is advertising itself as protecting its customers (which are both merchants and purchasers), then it should do so. In my particular case, I provided ample documentation to show that a) I had paid the charge and b) the company I paid closed up shop and had no intention of providing the service I paid for. Yet without explanation or transparency, they were able to shut my case down. I later learned I"m far from alone in this experience.

So perhaps the dislike of paypal for the reason in the article isn't warranted - but they have a long history of problems completely unrelated. That's what happens when you want to have all the profits associated with being a credit card processor, and yet be constrained by none of the regulations.