Does Your Payment Processor Sell You to Advertisers?

Yes, for most of the processors you're probably using. Stripe, PayPal, Square and SumUp have each disclosed selling or sharing customer data for behavioural advertising under California privacy law. Artega never holds a balance in the first place, so there's no payment history on our side to feed an ad system with.

What "disclosed" actually means here

This isn't speculation or a leaked memo. Under California privacy law, companies have to state directly, in their own privacy policies, when they sell or share personal data for behavioural advertising. Stripe, PayPal, Square and SumUp have all made that disclosure themselves:

• Stripe's privacy policy and privacy centre disclose selling or sharing data for behavioural advertising under CCPA.
• PayPal's privacy statement covers sharing customer data with participating stores and advertising partners.
• Square's privacy notice for buyer features self-discloses data "sold or shared" for targeted advertising under CCPA.
• SumUp's privacy policy discloses sharing data with advertising partners, including Google and Facebook, which may qualify as a sale under CCPA.

Four different companies, four separate self-disclosures, all pointing the same direction.

Why this is different from a data breach

Nothing here is a hack or a leak. It's the business model. Behavioural advertising works by tracking what you do and using it to predict and influence what you'll do next, on other platforms entirely. Once your booking or payment history is fed into that system, it doesn't stay contained to the transaction it came from.

Where Artega is different

Artega never holds a balance to begin with, so there's no payment history sitting on our side for an ad network to plug into. Artega's own data-sharing position will be added here once our data processing agreement with Wert is finalised — not yet cleared for publish.

The takeaway

If your current processor is one of the four above, your client's payment history is very likely already feeding an advertising system somewhere, by the processor's own admission.