Amazon and PayPal - Law Enforcement

[American Psycho]

I had some time recently to have a more thorough review of the latest privacy policies on Amazon and PayPal. All things considered it does seem Amazon has your back more when it comes to privacy and non disclosure of account information.

In the UK and EU, there is an option to request Amazon and PayPal to close your account and delete your information and it seems they do comply with this. There's no such feature in the US.

It seems PayPal pretty much has an open door to law enforcement (worldwide) and they give out everything to law enforcement even without a subpoena.

Amazon has a very different policy. It seems they mostly only disclose in response to subpoenas and search warrants, and even then they try to defend against anything they don't agree with.
You can see they publish the request and disclosures here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custo...SDRGWQ2C2CRYEF
Content data requests almost never get disclosed, whereas non-content data is released in about a third of cases.

One thing I have to say is there are countless examples of people being prosecuted for frauds on PayPal. But I can scarcely find a few examples of prosecutions supported by Amazon.

Does Amazon just not come to testify in criminal cases?

[Modee]

Why do you feel that PayPal gives out info without a search warrant or subpoena? I have documents that establish exactly what PayPal retains and what it releases. I will not disclose any of that publicly, but privately via tech support I have helped different clients with understanding exactly what AMZN, PP and eBay retain and disclose, and when, and why.

[American Psycho]

Why do you feel that PayPal gives out info without a search warrant or subpoena? I have documents that establish exactly what PayPal retains and what it releases. I will not disclose any of that publicly, but privately via tech support I have helped different clients with understanding exactly what AMZN, PP and eBay retain and disclose, and when, and why.

Because PayPal has an arm called PayPal Global Asset Protection, once a law enforcement user is established they can pretty much get full feed access to accounts under investigation. It's clearly listed here what PayPal/eBay retain and release: https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/s...g_airforce.pdf

My point is AMAZON seems to be a lot less cooperative and looks after your privacy more, which is in many respects surprising.

[Modee]

That’s not quite the way it works but you’d need tech support to augment your imperfect knowledge of this matter.

[ebaymunch]

My personal thoughts are that if you are looking into this kind of thing you are way past a suspension or trying to stay under the radar, so to speak, to continue part of what some of us have become dependent on for our livelihood. If you really are finding yourself concerned about one of these platforms even trying to subpoena, and it's a lot more difficult for someone to get a subpoena, especially when it comes to online stuff, partly because a lot of law enforcement don't understand it or want to deal with it, let alone ever seeing the light of day in a courtroom, because you would have to get a judge who understood it and okayed it, but nonetheless, if that is a concern, I would first pull the plug and try to erase as much as you can while you can and then go somewhere else for a bit. If you think someone or something could be sniffing around, by all means don't light up the path like a runway straight to yourself. Such as posting such a thing no matter your id name. When it comes down to companies, their bottom line is not whether they care about their customers being prosecuted, in what I assume would be an extremely rare event for an individual, they care about their bottom line and anything and everything that does or may effect it. So it's nice to think one company would CYA over another, except it's not about you it's about them, on that you can be certain. Best of luck.