[thelist] What method does Paypal use to do this?

Keith cache at dowebscentral.com
Thu Aug 22 07:19:01 CDT 2002


Hi Thomas

>Question: How is this accomplished? If a user gave
>their username and password voluntarily to a website
>(called them company A), could that website go out and
>gather all of the user's information in their account
>at company "B"? Could it come back in a usable format?

As Jonathan points out, this is technically quite simple to do. It's
trivial to write a virtual browser that can do anything a person and
browser can do. PayPal isn't the only one who has a comfortable
relationship with Ebay, a number of sites offer services where you can
build your eBay store at their site and Ebay comes to their site and
gathers the storefront for use on Ebay using basically the same technology.
The web is not a collection of independent, isolated websites, we're all
working on the same computer, and we're all using protocols that
purposefully makes our data available to all of us. Another example using
FTP protocols, at blogger.com you can enter the FTP username and password
for your website at their website and they pretend to be you, updating your
website with a virtual FTP client. Another example using POP protocols, you
can give your email account username and password to hotmail and it will go
get your email for you with a virtual POP client.

>Granted Ebay probably sued Paypal over
>this..regardless of the fact that they eventually
>bought them of course.
>
>Thoughts? I'm seeing more and more of this poping up
>in places and it raises all sorts of legal questions.

 From a legal point of view you're looking through the wrong end of the
telescope. If there was any contention at all between the two companies,
PayPal could have sued Ebay. Ebay has an in-house payment method
(Billpoint) that competes with PayPal. If Ebay had made access to that
information available to Billpoint but tried to make the information
unavailable to PayPal that would have constituted an unfair restraint of
trade. But I doubt there was any contention, Ebay has been a pioneer in the
thinking that "the value of information is squared when it's shared".
Offering the information in a "usable format" to all third party payment
processors would increase sales at Ebay, increasing Ebay's value to seller
and buyer alike. My guess is that if you want to get into that game, Ebay
has a query format available that returns the data in XML format using
standard interbank naming conventions.

>servers for the data? I'll be reasearching the legal
>end of it based on this research so any help or
>thoughts will help.

I have a script on a site that daily accesses a number of news sites
looking for new news articles. The pages on those sites are all published
with Dreamweaver, which conveniently encloses certain data chunks in
Dreamweaver proprietary tags so I can easily separate the article's
headline, author name, and contents (it's actually easier than if they had
used XML). The script examines new article pages looking for particular
author names and keywords in the article's contents. If the script finds
what I'm looking for it puts the URL for the article in cue to display on
my site. When someone on my site wants to read the article, another script
uses that URL to once again get that page from the other server, parse the
article, and display just the article's byline and contents as an SSI
include on my page. Legally I could do this without the permission of the
news site because my particular use of their article falls under the fair
use provision of the Copyright laws. However, I have contacted the news
sites involved and they enthusiastically endorse me doing this since I give
full credit and encourage my reader to visit the news site as a good source
for this kind of article on other subjects. Once again, "the value of
information is squared when it's shared", the news site now has a portal
that is bringing them eyeballs that are "pre-qualified" for their type of
news.

My point here is, in your research don't be surprised to find this kind of
thinking, what may look like a predator/prey relationship may turn out to
be a symbiotic relationship once you get below the surface of things.


Keith
====================
cache at dowebscentral.com




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