Stripe, the fast-growing on the web payment processor recognized for its ease of use, announced Friday that it is committing to transparency and user rights, following the path blazed by Google and Twitter.
“Our aim with Stripe is to help develop the financial infrastructure of the world wide web,” general counsel Jon Zieger wrote in a blog post. “Economic infrastructure, like other fundamental layers of the net, demands trust and transparency.”
Particularly, Stripe, which makes it easy for sites to accept payments on the internet, says that if it gets a legal request from a third celebration to quit performing business with a user, it will post the request to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse website. That web site publishes copyright takedown notices sent to internet companies, and its most prominent contributors are Google, Twitter and Github.
As Stripe will be the first payment processor to submit takedown requests, Chilling Effects is creating a new category on the web site.
Co-founder Patrick Collison hastened to say that the company isn’t changing its policies about which companies it will serve nor really should people take the post as an indication that it’s gotten a lot of such notices.
“This is considerably much more about finding the right policy in spot for the future,” Collison said, noting that Stripe just began accepting payments for Canadian firms, its 1st step outdoors of the U.S..
It’s not clear how frequently payment processors get asked to cease operating with a internet site or on what grounds. But the power and lack of transparency by the net’s dominant payment intermediaries was demonstrated in the fall of 2010, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all cut off donations to WikiLeaks right after the publication of a trove of U.S. diplomatic cables.
