Required Information

To open a PayPal account, you must provide your name, address, phone number, and email address. In order to make certain payments through PayPal, you must provide credit card, debit card or bank account information. We also ask you to choose two different security questions to answer (such as your city of birth or your pet's name). This required information is necessary for us to process transactions, issue a new password if you forget or lose your password, protect you against credit card fraud and current account fraud, and to contact you should the need arise in administering your account.

We will also require other commercial and/or identification information if you send or receive certain high-value transactions or high overall payment volumes through PayPal or as is otherwise required in order for us to comply with our anti-money laundering obligations.

Transaction Information

When you use PayPal to send money to someone else or request money from someone else, we ask you to provide information related to each transaction, consisting of the amount of the transaction, the type of transaction (purchase of goods, purchase of services, or simple money transfer and the email address, Skype ID (if applicable) or phone number of the third party. Also, when you send money to another PayPal customer, you may be asked to provide personal details to that customer to complete the transaction. Those details may also be passed on to us from that customer. We retain this information for each of your transactions through PayPal and may add this information to your account profile to be used for future transactions that you may make with us. We also collect the Internet address (IP address) and other identifying information about the computer or device you use to access your PayPal account, in order to help detect possible instances of unauthorised transactions.

Information About You From Third Parties

In order to protect all our customers against potential fraud, we verify the information you provide with bank processors listed in the table under the section "Disclosure to Third Parties Other than PayPal Customers" below. In the course of such verification, we receive personally identifiable information about you from such services. In particular, if you register a credit card or debit card with PayPal, we will use card authorisation and fraud screening services to verify that your card information and address match the information that you supplied to PayPal, and that the card has not been reported as lost or stolen.

If you send or receive high overall payment volumes through PayPal, in some circumstances we will conduct a background check on your business by obtaining information about you and your business from a credit bureau or a business information service such as Dun & Bradstreet, as listed in the table under the section entitled, "Disclosure to Third Parties Other than PayPal Customers" below. If you owe us money, we will generally conduct a credit check on you by obtaining additional information about you from a credit bureau, to the extent permitted by law. PayPal, at its sole discretion, also reserves the right periodically to retrieve and review a business and/or consumer credit report supplied by such credit bureau for any account, and reserves the right to close an account based on information obtained during this credit review process.

Additional Verification

If we cannot verify the information that you provide, or if you request a withdrawal by cheque to an address other than your verified credit card billing address, we ask you to send us additional information by fax (such as your driving licence, credit card statement, and/or a recent utility bill or other information linking you to the applicable address), or to answer additional questions online to help verify your information.

Website Traffic Information

Because of the way that World Wide Web communication standards work, when you arrive at or leave the PayPal website, we automatically receive the web address of the site that you came from or are going to. We also collect information on which pages of our website you visit while you are on the PayPal site, IP addresses, the type of browser you use and the times you access our website. We use this information to try to understand our customers' preferences better and to manage the load on our servers, so as to improve our service and your experience with PayPal.