I came across privacy.com, a service that generates virtual credit cards, like aliases for your real credit card that can be paused or discarded at any moment.
My own credit card company has this feature. But it requires a browser plugin that so obviously is there to track my spending habits, so I’ve not wanted to consider it. Privacy.com looks like a great alternative.
But is it even worth it? It may be a hastle, but I can also cancel my actual credit card at any moment and they will send me a new number immediately and a card a few days later. From a privacy prospective, how much can a company use my credit card credentials to track me? Maybe a third-party virtual card provider even masks my own purchases so not even my credit card company knows? Not sure about that one.
Please share if you use one, who its with, and if its worth it.
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I don’t think your CC company needs a browser plugin to track your spending habits, since they are, y’know, making the payments for you… They already have all the info they need on your spending habits. Heck, my bank even gives me a neat budget overview of how I spend my money and where.
I use privacy.com all the time and it’s great. Their virtual cards can only be charged by a single vendor so if anyone else tries to send it a charge, it fails. A small rural service firm I use has a clear and ongoing data breach. Every month or two three virtual cards I have with them starts being charged by thieves. The charges always fail because they aren’t the originally assigned vendor. I used to replace the virtual card at the vendor after every breach but it’s constant so I just let Privacy block the unauthorized charges.
Another feature I use is the fact that you can use any name and address for the card you want.
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I mostly use privacy.com for trials that I don’t want to have to worry about cancelling later. It’s also handy that privacy.com cards will allow you to put whatever you want as your billing address (for example, purchasing digital goods and setting your location to one that doesn’t have sales tax).
Will this get me trouble?
I use Privacy and no, why would it? You’re allowed to purchase goods and services with legal tender. You aren’t legally obligated to give any of them your personal information.
I used to have privacy.com , they will ask for really personal details such as SSN and Government issue ID. When I created an account back when it was really new they just ask you for email and password and the bank account number and routing after they started asking for more private information I decided to quit. Virtual credit cards of this nature are to be able to easily block and delete credit cards if gets leaked not really for protecting your privacy because it is tied to your bank account. I will prefer to use my own bank and credit card company virtual cards because they already have all my info to be honest.
My bank’s VISA functionality on my bankingcard not only requires a 2FA confirmation with a cardreader digipass every payment, but apparently also gives back an ‘expired’ answer when it gets checked after payment for ‘saving it for future purchases/subscriptions’, so most sites won’t and the ones that do have me removing and readding it everytime I want to pay… A bit of a hassle, yes, but it does prevent rogue companies from taking anything I’m not acknowledging behind my back and made the use of proxy-cc’s obsolete. It’ll just add another technical step through another service, which is just one extra thing that can bug out, while still having to do the digipass thing everytime anyway (or even remove and readd it there if it’s not able to save my card either.) 😅
What bank offers this?
Can I use it from EU?
Check out wise.com. I use them for client payments on occasion but they have virtual cards that you load up and use like a real Visa. You can set limits, even by vendors.
If you’re in the EU, Revolut is better than Wise because they have one-time-use virtual cards. As soon as the transaction is made, the number can’t be used again.
Yeah Wise has the same. I’m sure at this point they offer feature parity and it’s about quality of service. Wise has been good. Probably the least invasive. Bill.com was atrocious! Promises of removing my data and they are emailing me years later.
Wise does not have the same. Here’s my EU card page: https://i.imgur.com/yvrUSvq.png
They offer virtual cards, but not one-time-use cards. It’s a big difference in safety.
In fact, apart from just finding out about privacy.com (only available in the US), I’m not aware of anybody except Revolut who offers one-time-use cards.
e: If you know how to do it with Wise, please let me know. (Virtual cards which can be deleted after use are not the same as one-time cards.)
Sadly no. The cards are american and there is some thing that I forgot the name and exact function of, which allows you to pay with american cards inside the EU, however that requires id, which privacy.com does not do.
I use my card provider’s version of this, Capital One. I’ve used privacy.com once too but I figured I may as well limit the amount of information that goes out.
I’m not sure that it’s possible for you to… Mask your purchases? The option is more the ability to set end-dates - a one week subscription is only one week and will never renew, etc, and of course to prevent them from having your actual card details.
Either way, realistically you’d want to look into the ownership of these services - Eno, Privacy, etc and decide from there if it’s worth it to you.
I use privacy.com for free trials when I have no intention of continuing with the service after the trial ends. I still manually close the account but I use a Privacy card just in case they try to charge me anyway.
My bank provides those. They are generated for each physical card you own, inheriting its limits and blocking status. Each of those cards can be used for one payment. Unfortunately, there is no way to block them before making that one payment after you generate it.
No, I use monero. Much more secure
I think cash will always be better
How do you think they can provide their service free of charge? It’s because you are the product, and they likely track your own spending habits. However, I still use them occasionally if I ever want to sign up for a free trial or something similar, because you can put an all-time limit on each card. If my bank offered that feature though, I would just use it instead because my bank (a local credit union) would never track my data.
