Would you trust your financial data (= growth data, etc.) to a company like Paymill that's owned by a clone factory (i.e. the Samwers') or do you think that's being paranoid?
EDIT: I wasn't asking for downvotes, I was asking for rational comments, explanations, thoughts.
Hi, I asked them few questions and they seemed quite professional. Very German, asking for lots of paper, but that kind of make me feel safer.
And let's stop with this clone thing. If we are a community striving for execution, we should not be so annoying when people simply take ideas from somebody else and start executing.
I have no problem with cloning, everybody does it if we're being honest.
It's just that I'm not sure it's a good idea to give your business data to people whose main business model it is to look for the best ideas/markets/businesses and then to copy them.
To me, there seems to be a pretty obvious conflict of interest that might work against you.
I don't have anything against Paymill, but I think you may have a point there. The probability of someone who clones businesses for a living cloning yours is higher than of someone who doesn't. How much more, though, I couldn't say.
It is a good question, though in this case it could actually cut in the other direction. Stripe is a US company, which means that - from a German perspective - your data is less secure there. Think NSA and industrial espionage, obviously, but also think different data protection standards. The official legislation tends to be better in Europe when it comes to privacy, and this is especially true in Germany.
Well, Paymill is German and Stripe is based in the US, so from a trust viewpoint, I'd go with Paymill, maybe their customer data gets fleeced a bit less by the NSA than Stripe's.
Stripe has never participated in any kind of government surveillance program. Quite the opposite -- we're trying to figure out new ways to protect our users: https://stripe.com/blog/towards-transparency. As CEO, I'll do everything in my power to make sure that that remains the case. If you follow me on Twitter (I'm @patrickc), you'll notice that I'm no fan of this stuff.
Just to make this clear, I don't doubt your personal integrity.
However, I have lost faith in the ability of US-based companies using US-fiber and US datacenters to protect against NSA snooping.
I am not naive - I have no doubt that German fiber is monitored as well, but afaik LE could gain access to your servers and serve you a gag order - something they could not do over here.
So, my comment was in no way specific to Stripe - I don't trust Google or Apple either.
Yeah, I think that's generally reasonable, and I totally see where you're coming from. (Though I do believe that even though we're in the US, Stripe will do a better job of guarding the privacy of our customers than the vast majority companies.)
Having said that, in the particular domain of electronic payments, I think that meaningful privacy is (sadly) a mostly unattainable goal: it seems safe to assume that the card companies themselves collaborate with all kinds of surveillance. Given that everything ultimately becomes a transaction on those networks, what happens at the edges matters less.
Would you trust your financial data (= growth data, etc.) to a company like Paymill that's owned by a clone factory (i.e. the Samwers') or do you think that's being paranoid?
EDIT: I wasn't asking for downvotes, I was asking for rational comments, explanations, thoughts.