Stripe partners with Chilling Effects to report the legal complaints it receives against users

Following the lead of Google, Twitter and GitHub, US-based payments startup Stripe has just announced a partnership with Chilling Effects to report the “take-down” requests that it receives from third parties. Stripe says that it is the first payments company to do so, and because of this, Chilling Effects needed to create an entirely new category to track these complaints.

This move is important for the fast-growing service — if it intends to remain transparent as it expands internationally. As we reported earlier this month, Stripe recently moved beyond the US and into Canada, telling TNW that it is “already working on the next set of countries.”

More on the new process, from Stripe:

From now on, whenever a third party sends a legal request for us to stop working with a user, we will pass a copy of the request to Chilling Effects. (We will, however, first give the user the chance to opt out of this disclosure.) Reporting take-down requests is standard practice at Google, Twitter, and GitHub today.

We simply want to implement the right policies as early as possible, and we intend to build on these steps over time.

In addition to today’s partnership, Stripe is announcing updates to its privacy policy, which specifically require the startup to notify users whenever it is “legally compelled by a litigant or government to disclose a user’s private information.” According to Stripe, this is something that companies like Dropbox and Twitter already do, but it’s still good to see that the startup is watching out for users (as the law allows), while it scales.

These announcements are largely preparation for worst case scenarios, but should help the company build trust with it users, while showing that it plans to abide by local and international laws as it expands — killing two birds with one stone.

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