Exposed: Stripe

Stripe is the dominant online payment processing infrastructure company, powering payments for millions of businesses worldwide and processing over $1 trillion in annual payment volume. The company handles transactions for a substantial portion of internet commerce, including payments on platforms like Amazon, Google, Shopify, Instacart, and thousands of SaaS companies. This gives Stripe visibility into an extraordinary breadth of economic activity on the internet. Every transaction processed through Stripe generates data including the purchaser identity, payment method, merchant, products purchased, transaction amount, billing address, and device information. Stripe Radar, the company fraud detection system, builds behavioral risk profiles on individual consumers by analyzing transaction patterns across its entire merchant network, meaning your purchasing behavior at one Stripe-powered merchant informs risk assessments when you shop at another. Stripe Identity verifies customer identities for businesses using government IDs and biometric data. Stripe Financial Connections provides bank account linking similar to Plaid. The company has maintained a relatively strong privacy reputation compared to advertising-driven companies because its business model is based on transaction fees rather than advertising. However, the sheer volume and sensitivity of the financial data flowing through Stripe infrastructure makes it one of the most systemically important data custodians in the global economy, and any breach would be catastrophic.