360 owners who feel uncomfortable giving Microsoft credit card information for XBL purchases just got some good news. Major Nelson has announced that you can now use e-commerce giant PayPal for any Live transactions. The trick is that you can't add PayPal from the 360 itself, you have to set it up in advance on Xbox.com. 

As of right now, this service is only being offered in the US (sorry, rest of the world), and again, you cannot pay for MS points from your 360 via PayPal. And, of course, you have to already have a PayPal account before you can start adding any points. While this all seems a bit convoluted, it should put a few minds at ease in terms of privacy.

Of course I'm not sure how much more "at ease" people will be giving their financial information to PayPal as opposed to Microsoft directly. I don't think I'm alone in getting several dozen phishing scam e-mails a week, and the bulk of them come from a "PayPal e-mail address". So, I guess it gives people the option to pick their privacy poison.