Paypal has announced that Paypal business accounts will no longer be able to accept or receive personal (‘friends and family’) payments transactions, and that no Paypal account will be able to send friend and family transactions to Paypal business accounts. This is effective next month, July 28, 2022.

Peter Deacon had been a Pandora user for years, using Pandora’s free service. Then Pandora shared his private information, including his full name, his music preferences, and what he listened to, both on Facebook, and for anyone searching the Internet, Not cool, he thought, and sued for breach of privacy. But the Michigan high court ruled last week that because he doesn’t pay for the Pandora account, he is not a ‘customer’, and so not entitled to privacy protection.

With massive security data breaches happening more and more frequently, there is almost no way to avoid your own personal data being compromised. But what is the likelihood that your compromised data will actually be used for identity theft, fraud, or financial theft? Here’s how it breaks down.

Proposed California law AB 242, introduced by Assemblyman Ed Chau, is creating quite a buzz due to its wording, or rather, proposed lack of wording. AB 242 would require that all commercial websites and services offered through the Internet which collect personal information about California consumers make its privacy policy be written at a level of 8th grade reading, and be no longer 100 words.

Google is making clear how they will be handling warrants and subpoenas for users’ personal information. With January 28th being Data Privacy Day, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, shared three initiatives on the Google blog, which detail how Google plans to protect user privacy when faced with a warrant or subpena to hand over private user information.

Today Google posted some news on their blog, along with the release of their Transparency Report, which shows increasing requests from the government for private user data. In fact, the report shows that, of all the governments in the world, the U.S. leads the pack in personal information requests.

If you have reason to send money by Paypal to anyone in India – or if you are someone in India needing to receive money via Paypal – well, you may be out of luck, unless you can legitimately claim that the funds sent by Paypal are not for personal use, but, rather, are a business transaction for the purchase of goods. That is because Paypal has suspended all personal payments to India, and has even taken the radical step of reversing some personal Paypal payments to people in India that were already paid (leaving the hapless recipient with a negative balance), all at the demand of the Indian government, over concern that funds earmarked as ‘personal’ may actually be money being sent home by Indian citizens working overseas (known as a “remittance”).