PayPal, the electronic payment service owned by eBay Inc., has denied that it plans to tag Apple Inc.'s Safari as "unsafe" and block it from accessing the site.

"We have absolutely no intention of blocking current versions of any browsers, including Apple's Safari, from our website," a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail late Friday.

PayPal was reacting to reports of a research paper released the week before by Michael Barrett, the firm's chief information security officer, that said the payment service would ban browsers that lacked a way to block known or suspected phishing sites, and didn't support Extended Validation (EV) certificates.

By PayPal's revised criteria of "obsolete browsers on outdated or unsupported operating systems," then, it would not block IE5 until 2010, and would not bar Safari 2.0 on Tiger until Apple ships the successor to Mac OS X 10.5, aka "Leopard."

However, as of Sunday, PayPal had not replied to questions about when it would switch on its browser blocking. Apple has also not responded to queries asking for comment.