EULA Madness

The PayPal (PayPal is the by far largest on-line payment processor, with tens of millions of users) User Agreement used to be over 300 pages and states that they may confiscate your money at any time, for any or no reason. You also agree to waive the rights given to you by credit card providers (and law) among a lot of other things. Now it is even bigger and split into different chapters. Again I want to stress that contrary to common belief, U.S. is not a business friendly country.

Speaking of PayPal, I read this book The PayPal Wars that is written by one of the employees that tells his story about the first years of the company. It's very interesting and also it confirms some things that often annoy me when it comes to U.S. businesses... in this case PayPal; They don't have bad consciense about lying, they even consider it their duty to lie if it benefits the company as long as the lie is hard enough to prove. Obviously it would be bad for business to lose customers to bad reputation or lawsuits that comes with badly performed lies.

The book also makes no secret about the fact that many people got their money confiscated ("frozen") by PayPal, and it is obvious that it is a tactic to make the funds hard to retreive so people in dispute with PayPal give up, leaving funds in the pockets of PayPal. The author also mentions the Class Action Lawsuit against Paypal. Funnily enough, (as I claim the same in earlier posts) he blames the bad business environment in the U.S. for this, claiming that since PayPal became successful, greedy lawyers wanted to get a cut of the wealth. That may be the case but since PayPal actually DID rob many of their customers, I believe this particular lawsuit was a good thing.