Before a trip you check visas, plug types, and currency. Few people check how the internet is controlled where they are going, whether their work is legal there, or who to call if something goes wrong. For journalists, human-rights defenders, NGO staff, and researchers, those are the questions that actually affect their safety, and the hard part is that you usually don't know what to ask before you leave.
On 9 May 2017, the cross-border electronic payment service PayPal closed all domestic transaction functions in Taiwan. Two PayPal Taiwan accounts could no longer send money to each other. Cross-border transfers kept working. The streamer economy took the worst hit. Twitch Cheer, YouTube Super Chat, StreamLabs, and NightDev — tools that processed local audience tips through PayPal — went dark on the same day. Small organizations and independent media that relied on PayPal for domestic flows lost a payment rail overnight8.
The legal trigger was Article 3, Paragraph 1 of Taiwan's Electronic Payment Institution Management Act, passed in 2015. PayPal chose not to apply for a license and closed domestic functions instead9. Nearly nine years later, the U.S. online payment processor Stripe still does not allow individuals or companies in Taiwan to register. Stripe is the credit card collection layer behind Substack, many subscription SaaS products, and many open source sponsorship pages. Individual creators in Taiwan have to first register a U.S. LLC to use it10.
In Taiwan's payment conversation, these two facts have usually been filed under "compliance trade-offs" or "market size." EFF's former Activism Director Rainey Reitman, in her April 2026 book Transaction Denied12, compiles cases from 2012 onward across the U.S. and the Middle East. Stacked together, the cases reveal a cross-region, cross-issue pattern that's been running for more than a decade. Taiwan's two events belong in that record. So do parallel events from Hong Kong, mainland China, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia, which Reitman's book — focused on U.S. and Middle Eastern material — does not yet cover.
This article is based on the original explainer by fria at Privacy Guides:
Can you collect data from a large group of people while still protecting each individual's privacy? Differential privacy answers yes — with a mathematical proof to back it up. This article introduces the concept, traces its history from early anonymization failures to real-world deployments, and explores what it means for users and policymakers in Taiwan and the broader Chinese-speaking world.