Mega: PayPal ends partnership over end-to-end encryption

PayPal has canceled its partnership with Mega, the storage service says. The reason would be that Mega offers end-to-end encryption by default, which prevents the cloud storage service from seeing what is stored.

Whether that is actually the reason that PayPal has terminated the collaboration with Mega is unclear: PayPal confirms that it has terminated the agreement, but will not indicate why when asked.

However, Mega claims that the company decided to end the partnership after being pressured by credit card companies MasterCard and Visa. They, in turn, would have been pressured by a US senator, Democrat Patrick Leahy. He would have responded to a report by the organization NetNames, affiliated with the American copyright watchdog MPAA, in which Mega is portrayed as a ‘non-legitimate service’.

Mega argues that it is a legitimate service that works just as well with authorities as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Dropbox and SpiderOak, among others. The biggest difference with those services, apart from SpiderOak, is that Mega does not have access to the files that users store. Files are encrypted with the user’s password, unlike Dropbox and Google Drive, for example. They do encrypt files, but with a key that is known by the provider. If requested, those services can give the government access to files, something Mega cannot. Mega says it has no intention of changing that method.

In 2010, PayPal’s refusal to cooperate with whistleblower site WikiLeaks caused a stir. This made it a lot more difficult for that site to accept money, something that put PayPal on ddos ​​attacks by WikiLeaks supporters. PayPal also sometimes refuses to cooperate with, for example, Usenet providers.