The Rundown↓
KNOW PayPal announced a “multiyear strategic partnership focused on advancing several commerce solutions” with Google.
REALIZE the partnership opens the door for AI agents in online commerce.
EXPLORE PayPal’s press release.
Details↓
Yesterday PayPal and Google announced a partnership to integrate PayPal’s payment solutions across Google products and platforms. The release also revealed efforts to reshape online commerce with “agentic shopping” where consumers are assisted by AI. Alex Chriss, President and CEO of PayPal, explains:
In this emerging world of agentic commence, trust and innovation are key. Together with Google, we are leading the way for digital commerce, ensuring greater opportunities for merchants and users worldwide.
How Google and PayPal will fully implement AI agents is uncertain, but the duo is hoping to develop “standards that will help shape the future of agentic commerce across the industry.”
Commentary↓
Late last year PayPal updated their privacy policy to share user data with stores and advertisers. It coincided with PayPal’s largest ever marketing campaign with Will Ferrell singing PayPal’s praises… “I wanna pay with you everywhere.” Not quite as legendary as Gene Frenkle with the cowbell, but it was pretty catchy.
While luring us to spend more with impressive cashback offers, PayPal positioned itself to collect and share the data of that expected wave of new spending.
The day before yesterday’s announcement, PayPal once again updated their privacy policy “to improve clarity and consistency.” It has an impressive list of personal information they collect on pages 2 and 3, and on page 11 you’ll find this little advisory:
Agentic AI Tools require access to certain information to function effectively. When you use these tools, they will have access to your Personal Information, including queries, preferences, interests, purchase history, and payment information.
It seems clear from the press release’s mention of “data-driven personalization” and intent of “bringing PayPal's products and services to billions of Google users” this partnership will feature an epic scale of data collection.
While there’s no perfect privacy solution, we recommend you opt out of PayPal’s personalized shopping, and while you’re at it, change your Venmo transaction settings to private (they’re public by default).
Seeing these two giants team up once again seems to validate privacy advocates’ warnings about Agentic AI potentially being a privacy nightmare. We’ll be following these developments and keeping you informed.
Companies need to adapt and stay competitive, but we need movement away from sharing personal data, not toward it. More cowbell, less tracking please.