That’s absolutely fine. Everyone has to decide in whom to trust. I simply want to trust as few companies as practical.
PayPal has lots of incentive to protect your credentials as losing them will cause billions in lawsuits or even possible bankruptcy. We have not yet seen a major customer data breach of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, or PayPal to my knowledge. That’s why I brought up the local restaurant chain as an example; they don’t have a multi-million-dollar security team hired from deep talent pools.
Target and other stores have the proper incentive, as well, but they are not primarily trust brokers; they are retail outlets and their technical expertise is often less than cutting-edge. Google, PayPal, or another company may lose all our stuff tomorrow, but they all know that such a breach would be severely harmful. The big players have huge targets painted on their backs, for better and worse.
I’ve had a PayPal account since the 1990’s when they first partnered with eBay. I don’t know if they’re trustworthy, but I’ve never lost money with them and they’ve never reported a serious breach of their systems nor has anyone accused them of hiding such a breach. Perhaps I’ve simply not heard about their bad behavior?
My only complaints are with their aggressive tactics, their ridiculous resistance to be regulated as a bank, and that their system repeatedly switched my payment source from credit card to PayPal Credit during 2017.
I have screenshots showing that the credit card was selected for at least one of those transactions, yet I later got statements from PayPal Credit claiming a balance. I was not happy :rage: , but this hasn’t happened in about 2 years. Was it website error or fraud? I don’t know.
Nothing is foolproof and your approach is absolutely fine since you will avoid the harm when PayPal does get breached or misuses our data. Trust is a huge, seemingly intractable, problem in the Internet Era. The almighty block chain has not magically solved that problem.