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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

The small print is scary, at least compared to a service like PayPal. There's absolutely no consumer protection unless you're actually buying something from Facebook themselves, and for any kind of returns or refunds the advice given is "contact your bank".

Yikes.

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At least it will be easier to detect scams on marketplace now. As soon as they ask you to pay with facebucks, you know you're going to lose your cash!

At least compared to PayPal?! PayPal refused to help with a fraudulent short term rental payment. Thank God that I paid through PayPal with a credit card and the credit card company helped. Horrible company.

I thought that was implied and fb pay seems even worse than paypal.

When something wants to be involved in financial transactions and it can be described as "scary" compared to PayPal, you've engineered a problem. PayPal has a history of being customer hostile and withholding funds without notice. I don't plan to read the FB TOS because I have a hard block in place for them but that's a pretty damning statement.

LOL. Reminds me when I got scammed paying for something with my card through Cash app. Even though they identified that I had got ripped off their support script had a bug that would not allow them to refund me, so they said it was easier just to terminate my account.

For reference the relevant section is

> How secure is Facebook Pay in online stores?

> To keep your information secure, your debit and credit card numbers are encrypted for safe and secure storage. This information won’t be shared with sellers.

> With Facebook Pay, you can create a PIN or use your device's face or fingerprint recognition to confirm payments. Learn how to set up a PIN for Facebook Pay.

> For transactions you make with Facebook Pay, you’ll receive payment confirmation details in an email. If you see a transaction you don’t recognize, please contact your bank or financial institution.

And

> Is there Purchase Protection for online shopping?

> Purchases made through third-party sites, local pickups, Messenger transactions, or through other messaging services don't qualify for Purchase Protection. Learn more about how Purchase Protection works on Facebook.

https://pay.facebook.com/faqs/

That's the same way that Venmo (or any of the other p2p payments) work (though I guess Venmo has a specific "opt in to some extra protection for a fee").

Makes sense to me. Customer protection means bigger costs => bigger cuts on transactions. I would rather keep the cuts low.

This seems logical to me? Why should Facebook arbitrate a transaction between friends?

I wouldn’t use PayPal as any kind of a reference point. They compete with themselves to be the worst.

Payments are regulated by financial regulation in many countries, no matter the fine print.

For EU countries this would probably be governed by the PSD2 payment services directive and the GDPR data protection.

Specifically, payment transaction data may reveal personal data and using it for other purposes than the payment itself would require explicit consent.

IANAL. It would be interesting if lawyers with up to data knowledge on financial regulations in various jurisdictions could elaborate on this.

They're not talking about data security. They're talking about reversibility of transactions.

Surely only your bank can reverse a transaction, why would Facebook be expected to do this?

Because other companies that offer similar services offer this feature, and thats why people use it and trust it. Paypal is very buyer focused as opposed to seller focused. Eg. if you buy something on ebay and you don't get the product or its defective or its fraud, paypal reverses the tx and puts the onus on the seller to prove you wrong.

This doesn't matter so much when sending money to friends, but an expected use case people imagine for facebook based p2p tx is fb marketplace, where you can buy things from random people online. A lot of fraud and sketchy behavior already happens there (eg. buying stolen products). Not being able to have easy reversion of such tx is bad for buyers (and good for fraudulent sellers).

Not sure if you're in the USA, but for US users, banks are pretty hands off this sort of behavior and will only reverse TX in serious fraud issues, but require the loser to pass a high bar to prove its fraud. Normal bank to bank tx is a "pull" model, so middle men services typically offer protection for the buyer to stop a "pull" in the case of fraud. Thats why the US has created many p2p services that are "push" based (eg. venmo, cash app), and why credit cards companies offer protections like charge reversal and take on that risk (you agree that you'll return money in a charge-back as a condition of VISA/etc letting you use the network).

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