PayPal has recently launched PayPal Ads, a new venture into the digital advertising space under the leadership of Mark Grether, a veteran from Uber and Amazon. The program raises concerns as it capitalizes on its access to extensive user transaction data, which includes data from not only PayPal itself but also Venmo and the shopping tool Honey. This approach involves analyzing the financial transactions of its 400 million active users in the US who still use the service, sparking skepticism about the ethical implications of such deep data mining for advertising purposes.

In an interview with ADWEEK, Grether boasted about the unprecedented scale of transaction data available to PayPal, which exceeds what any single retailer could accumulate. Such statements highlight the vast scope of personal financial information PayPal plans to utilize, underlying potential privacy concerns for consumers who may not fully realize how their purchasing data is being commoditized.

“The newest offering from PayPal underscores the importance of incrementally: While data and signals tied to consumer purchasing are not necessarily new, the opportunity to infuse incremental moments of influence throughout shoppers’ journeys opens up real-time engagement for advertisers,” JiYoung Kim, the chief operating officer for North America at GroupM told Business Insider.

PayPal’s entry into this market includes features like Advanced Offers, which were tested earlier in its app to provide targeted cash-back promotions. This feature has now morphed into a broader ad-selling business across PayPal’s platforms, with plans to expand into video ads and self-serve ad technologies.

While PayPal touts the advantages of its comprehensive view of consumer behavior, which purportedly helps brands optimize their advertising expenditures and increase market share, this level of surveillance and data exploitation can be seen as overreaching. The firm’s anticipation of an inevitable consolidation in retail ad networks, as stated by Grether, suggests a future where fewer, more powerful entities hold significant sway over consumer data and privacy.