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I don't have references immediately at hand, but after encountering a
little high-handed grief from PayPal a while back, the Mrs. and I read a
TON of stories of this and that PayPal account holder being screwed.
Apparently - among other issues - they employ policies to counter
money-laundering that have killed and crippled some legitimate businesses.
Imagine engaging the big money-changer to be the conduit for your little
start-up internet business. You muddle along for months, doing
transactions, slowly increasing your transactions, money comes in, money
gets paid out. Then, some important reviewer plugs your site/biz and it
takes off. You go from having hundreds of dollars or a couple of thousand
in your account at any one time to having tens of thousands. And suddenly,
with absolutely no warning at all, it's frozen. You call, you e-mail, you
text, you frantically try to find out what's wrong.
It seems you've tripped a threshold that somebody thinks implies that you
are a money launderer, drug dealer, arms dealer, or some-such. You can't
pay your creditors or your employees. Your life and livelihood are tied up,
and they won't even tell you when, or if you'll regain access to your own
money. Your complaints are directed to the fine-print that you accepted.
You never imagined that this is what it meant.
Anyway, that's the model that was repeated time and again.
I don't know if it's all history, or if it still goes on.
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Dossy Shiobara <dossy -at- panoptic -dot- com> wrote:
> Are you worried that your bank will refuse to give you your money when
> you ask for it? Or, close your account on a whim, just because they can
> -- and keep your money?
>
> Yeah, those are the real (not imagined, not hypothetical) risks when
> trusting someone else to provide you a service, such as Gmail:
>
> Gmail Disaster: Reports Of Mass Email Deletions
>
>http://techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-mass-email-deletions/
>
> Google Has Disabled My GMail Account
>
>http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-has-disabled-my-gmail-account/7871/
>
> Behave on Google Plus or Your Gmail Gets It
>http://gawker.com/5823121/behave-on-google-plus-or-your-gmail-gets-it
>
> Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life, Shrugs
>
>http://consumerist.com/2011/07/22/google-deletes-last-7-years-of-users-digital-life-shrugs/
>
> See, there are laws and regulations to keep, say, your bank from seizing
> your assets and terminating your account, or refusing to give you your
> money.
>
> Until there are such consumer protections for services like email ...
> well, I would judiciously limit how much you trust such service operators.
>
> And, to anyone who's blissfully ignorant and using hosted mail services,
> I strongly suggest you periodically make backup copies of your OWN data
> to a storage that you control 100%. Just because it's "not on my
> computer, it's in the cloud" doesn't mean you no longer need to back it up.
>
>
> On 2/27/13 12:01 PM, Robert Lauriston wrote:
> > Gmail. I don't see any meaningful privacy issues. My bank has my money
> > but I don't worry that they're going to steal it.
>
> --
> Dossy Shiobara | "He realized the fastest way to change
> dossy -at- panoptic -dot- com | is to laugh at your own folly -- then you
>http://panoptic.com/ | can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)
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