Sir_Didymus Posted June 1, 2015 Report Share Posted June 1, 2015 Hi guys, With the CTF coming up, I’m wondering if we could take a look at paypal? The privacy policy is a little unclear but it seems like some personal information is sent to the recipient of any money donated. Can anyone tell me if this is right? And if so, is there no other method of payment we could maybe consider instead, if not now, then at a later date? Sorry if I’m talking rubbish :/ ~Didy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CROCKODUCK Posted June 2, 2015 Report Share Posted June 2, 2015 I was wondering this exact same thing, what exactly is seen and sent with donations? Perhaps we could look into more than one method as well as some of us have distrust in paypal. http://www.youcaring.com Is a good example of the tools that exist. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dumbo52 Posted June 2, 2015 Report Share Posted June 2, 2015 I agree that the details of the donation process are probably a little murkier than they should be; I'll try to shed some light on it. The process works roughly like this: You click the Donate button at http://nerd.nu/donate/. You're taken to PayPal, where you authorize and confirm the transaction. PayPal sends us the results of the transaction, including some personal information about the donor. We store the transaction results in a database, and some non-sensitive information about the donation is posted publicly in the donation list. A few important things to note here: The only pieces of personal information PayPal sends us are your first and last name, your email address, and your country, state, and city. However, I know that even some of this information is probably more than we need to collect, so I'm discussing with the other tech admins the possibility of no longer collecting any information about donors' names or locations. Essentially, instead of just storing the full contents of what PayPal sends us, we'd only be picking out the non-sensitive information when receiving data from PayPal. I'll let you know what we decide on this topic. Tech admins are the only ones with any access to the personal information PayPal sends us. Even then, we should not be looking at this information -- we have access to it only out of virtue of the fact that the tech admins control the box on which the information is stored. The only information that will be available to the public about your donation is your username (or first name, if you fail to provide a username), the amount you donated, and the time at which your donation was processed. We provide this information because we'd like to give recognition to everyone who has decided to donate to keep the servers running; there is no personal information here. Finally (and maybe this should have been mentioned sooner), if you're still concerned about your personal information, PayPal also allows you to donate using your credit card, bypassing the PayPal login (see the "Don't have a PayPal account?" area in the bottom left once you've clicked the donate button). This payment method actually sends us significantly less information about you; the only personal information included if you pay with your credit card is your first name and email address, but we receive all of the information we need to fully recognize you in our donation list. So, while we're doing our best to protect your privacy, you also have the option to use an alternate payment method which does some of the work of hiding your personal information for us -- it's completely your decision, and any donations will be greatly appreciated. I also plan on including some of this information about privacy (as well as some other interesting and useful information about the donation drive) on the new donation page (which should be released soon!) so that everyone can have these questions answered. I hope this answers most of your questions. I understand that the topic of privacy is very important to some people, so please let me know if you have any further concerns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
schererererer Posted June 2, 2015 Report Share Posted June 2, 2015 I was wondering this exact same thing, what exactly is seen and sent with donations? Perhaps we could look into more than one method as well as some of us have distrust in paypal. http://www.youcaring.com Is a good example of the tools that exist. Just as a note, YouCaring is just a platform that uses paypal, stripe, and wepay - all of which charge the same base fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. I'm not sure of the customer service reputations of these other payment services (have only heard of stripe in passing before, and have never heard of wepay). The biggest problem we've had with paypal in the past is with them freezing our account, I believe due to suspicious activity from sudden large donations after long periods of nothing (i.e. donation drives), but afaik this hasn't happened for quite a while. We should be able to pretty easily set up alternative services for those who dislike paypal - Google Wallet was mentioned as a possibility too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CROCKODUCK Posted June 2, 2015 Report Share Posted June 2, 2015 Just anything that process through a third party vendor so it says "PLAYER X DONATED $200" or such would be ideal but I suppose even a first and last name isn't the worst as far as personal information as dumbo pointed out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
c45y Posted June 2, 2015 Report Share Posted June 2, 2015 This could probably be moved out of MCP. Information is relevant to everyone, not just staff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Former Staff Posted June 2, 2015 Report Share Posted June 2, 2015 This could probably be moved out of MCP. Information is relevant to everyone, not just staff. I also plan on including some of this information about privacy (as well as some other interesting and useful information about the donation drive) on the new donation page (which should be released soon!) so that everyone can have these questions answered. I hope this answers most of your questions. I understand that the topic of privacy is very important to some people, so please let me know if you have any further concerns. I was thinking the same until I saw Dumbo's quote above. That said, this topic could be moved either way as any disclosure on the donation process can only help to make people feel more comfortable doing it, if they can. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts