Update on PayPal's user agreement

By guest blogger Katie Coulson

On June 15, we blogged about PayPal's new user agreement. The new agreement includes expansive language giving PayPal the right to send autodialed or prerecorded calls on any subject to any phone number associated with a PayPal account. This change sparked outrage among PayPal users, and the FCC intervened. On June 11, an FCC enforcement officer sent a letter to PayPal’s General Counsel, expressing concern that the updated agreement violated FCC regulations. Specifically, the letter outlined portions of regulations, codified at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200, that were issued by the FCC as part of the implementation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. These regulations require express written consent from consumers who wish to receive certain prerecorded calls and forbid companies from conditioning their service on such consent.

Today, PayPal issued a statement announcing its plan to modify the agreement. The changes include:

• “Primarily” using autodialed or prerecorded calls only for specific purposes including fraud detection, account activity notification, and debt collection;
• Obtaining consent before sending autodialed or prerecorded calls for marketing purposes or otherwise as required by law; and
• Providing products and services to customers regardless of whether they consent to receiving such calls.

The new agreement is set to go into effect on July 1.

The language of the user agreement without the June 29^th modifications is as follows:

By providing PayPal a telephone number (including a mobile telephone number), you agree to receive autodialed and prerecorded message calls at that number. The ways in which you provide us a telephone number include, but are not limited to, providing a telephone number at Account opening, adding a telephone number to your Account at a later time, providing it to one of our employees, or by contacting us from that phone number. If a telephone number provided to us is a mobile telephone number, you consent to receive SMS or text messages at that number. We won’t share your phone number with non-affiliated third parties for their purposes without your consent, but may share your phone numbers with our Family of Companies or with our service providers, such as billing or collections companies, who may contact you using autodialed or prerecorded message calls or text messages. Standard telephone minute and text charges may apply if we contact you.

Comments

[andrews]

Since they do not show the new language in their update, it is hard to be sure that there is anything more than the weasel wording visible in the update.

They will use the phone number ``primarily'' for legitimate-sounding purposes. So what about secondary uses? Well, they do not say.

And there is no mention of whether using the service is still to be deemed consent to telemarketing.