privacy.com alternative? (credit card info masking services for online payments)

zzz

Hi all ~

Curious if anyone has experience with privacy.com or another service like it?

Seems like the service creates multiple "credit card aliases", which function just like email aliases and serve the same fundamental purpose.

My reasoning is that I'd prefer to have my banking info stored with just a few trusted parties online. An online shoe retailer, for example, should not be trusted to store my CC info. I'd rather hand them a one-off card # generated via the service, prefilled with just enough money to make my purchase.

Then when the data inevitably breaches / leaks / is abused, the shoe retailer and the perp have only worthless one-off CC info, not my daily driver.

Services like PayPal solve this problem in theory, except not everyone takes PayPal.

Looking for alternatives to privacy.com because I see that they are venture-capital backed.
https://privacy.com/about
I worry that this indicates a built-in incentive to abuse data / users in the name of the hyper-growth, which is usually the story with venture-backed startups (eventually).

Does anyone know of an alternative?

I tried searching the forums for past discussions on this, but the search feature keeps returning a lot of unrelated threads.

Thanks all

Overlay1404

zzz

zzz Seems like the service creates multiple "credit card aliases", which function just like email aliases and serve the same fundamental purpose.

Just for clarification, these are more akin to debit cards then credit cards. Users are not paying with credit, payments are directly tied to an account.

zzz My reasoning is that I'd prefer to have my banking info stored with just a few trusted parties online. An online shoe retailer, for example, should not be trusted to store my CC info. I'd rather hand them a one-off card # generated via the service, prefilled with just enough money to make my purchase.

Most of these retailers, are using third parties to store the data you are worried about anyway. Very few companies are processing their own credit card payments. These act as intermediaries between the merchan and the credit card company. Its a misconception that, for example, the shoe retailer has any of that information.

Toomanyuserprofiles

Local monero exchanges

zzz

Toomanyuserprofiles
Nice in theory

In practice, very few ecommerce merchants accept monero
Far fewer than Paypal, and even Paypal's adoption among merchants is too sparse for many needs.

Looking for a service that generates disposable CC numbers loaded with small amounts of money.

Monero is overkill privacy-wise - the goal is to hide my primary CC info from random ecommerce merchants with shoddy security practices, not necessarily from banks / bigcorps / govt.

rip_terry_davis

XMR is a great choice everywhere it is accepted, which leaves you still needing a way to pay for the other 98% of businesses and services.

OP is smart to see privacy.com for the ticking time bomb it is - any time you type your real phone number, address, driver's license, and name into a website it's a matter of time before that data is sold to a third party after an acquisition or leaked in a breach. demanding this type of info from people who are into online privacy is nuts.

it is not a service built by privacy advocates which provides true anonymity, we were just an unexploited demographic and gobbled up the marketing.

zzz

rip_terry_davis
Thanks for the encouragement!

I would only add that its reasonable for a service like privacy.com to ask for my name, address, and CC info, because they are working within the banking system with KYC laws.

I only wish that privacy.com would sustain their growth through revenue generated by competitive services that customers love and support (like for example Proton), rather than through corrupt VCs with bad incentives.

zzz

Just an update, I did find some other services -

IronVest (formerly Blur)
https://ironvest.com/virtual-cards/
The fees look high though.
They seem to focus mostly on other services.

MySudo
https://support.mysudo.com/hc/en-us/articles/17403738961307-What-are-MySudo-virtual-cards-and-how-do-they-work
I think there are some other threads on the forum that discuss MySudo with mixed results. Usually the threads are more about phone #s though, rather than virtual cards.

petrnovak

https://paywithmoon.com/

It is a service that gives you a virtual visa card. You can load money to it with bitcoin ower lightning network. Only personal information they ask for is an email. (no-kyc)

As a no-kyc card, it cannot be used for money transfers (like deposits to some financial institution), just purchasing things online.

Fees are 1% deposit fee (hidden in exchange rate between bitcoin you deposit and USD balance you get) and 1% spending fee with a minimum of 1 USD for every transaction. (So not good, not terrible)

It can be send worldwide, with a acception of some sanctioned countries.

DeletedUser84

petrnovak thank you for this, this looks amazing for Aussie users.

Speeduser7533

petrnovak

If you're going to do this isn't it better to buy a $200 Visa gift card with cash and just use that?

This is what I always come back to every time I think about this next privacy move.

BeepBeep

Been a while since I looked at them, but unless something has changed, MySudo used to only offer credit cards on iOS. And, at the time I tried them, their website was not at all good about disclosing the absence of that important feature on Android. Moreover, the price for the service wasn't less on Android despite missing a key feature. They also charged you both annually and also every time you changed a phone number, and with only 5 identities, it wasn't so good for burners. It was cool to have a full communications suite of email, voice and sms in one app, although I never could get the voice function fully working on GOS (without Google Play)

Shortly after I'd paid the annual fee, MySudo summarily cancelled my account for a terms of service violation, saying I'd used MySudo outside the US, and that wasn't allowed. In reality, all I did was connect to a VPN through a US gateway, and VPN had routed my traffic outside the US. It was pretty silly that a privacy oriented service hadn't even considered that someone might use a VPN, but the real irritant was that they cut me off, without ever contacting me or even telling me exactly why. It took me several days to persuade them to get my account reactivated. Overall, not a positive experience. Maybe they've gotten better.

GrouchyGrape

Privacy.com is what I've been using for a few years. I agree that it has it's issues, but my primary goal using it isn't privacy, but security. If/when they have a data breach, I can change my card and add the new card to the site, nothing else is affected. This wouldn't be the case if I added that same card to all these different sites which increases the headache of getting a new card (let alone the attack surface increase). This solution isn't perfect, but it fits my current lifestyle.

The feature set of privacy.com is also pretty awesome. If I could find a better replacement I'd be all over it. But for 99% of my transactions, this is great.

PaulDavis

Starling will allow you to create virtual debit cards attached to your main account

petrnovak

Speeduser7533
I am from Europe, these do not exist here. In fact, in most countries there are no "visa gift cards" you can just buy in cash from local store.

And if you live in the country where they exist, they usually only works with merchant from that same country. (USA visa gift card only work with merchant from USA)

And merchant acceptance is not good. Often they just do not accepts it.

spl4tt

I was using revolut for thos for a long time now, but they started banning grapheneos users now, so I'm also on the lookout for a new app for european users

SilverCat38

spl4tt revolut works now with the latest build

petrnovak

So if:

you live in a location where visa gift cards are available
you know merchant you want to buy from accept such gift cards (or is likely to accept it AND you have different place to spend the gift card if they won't)
money you wants to buy with is in cash or your bank account (not already in Bitcoin)

Then visa gift cards are likely better choice.

But:

if visa gift cards are not an option (because it do not exist in your region or because it do not work with merchant you wants to buy from)
Or if you already have most of your money in bitcoin and (given the current price) you prefer to spent from your bitcoin instead from your bank account

Then service like paywithmoon is probably better option.

Agreed on the debit/credit clarification

About this:

Its a misconception that, for example, the shoe retailer has any of that information.

I've read reports that seem to contradict.
For example, the 2024 Hot Topic breach:

the exposed details include full names, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, physical addresses, purchase history, and partial credit card data for Hot Topic, Box Lunch, and Torrid customers
[...]
the dataset contains 25 million credit card numbers encrypted with a weak cipher that's easy to break using modern computers.
[...]
the breach may have originated from an information stealer malware infection that stole credentials for a data unification service used by Hot Topic.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hibp-notifies-57-million-people-of-hot-topic-data-breach/

Perhaps a 3rd party processes the payment info. But these retailers still retain credentials that have access to sensitive info, and those credentials are often leaked / hacked / breached.

Overlay1404

zzz

If you read how that breach happened

A report from HudsonRock published on October 23 suggested that the breach may have originated from an information stealer malware infection that stole credentials for a data unification service used by Hot Topic

From the HudsonRock article:

researchers discovered an employee who was recently infected by an Infostealer on September 12th, 2024

With over 240 credentials found on the machine, many of which are corporate, researchers determined that this person is employed at a company called “Robling”, whose description is “Helping retailers unite data across silos”.

To me that reads as an employee from a third party processor was infected with an info stealer, and that was used to get info from Hot Topic

The scariest part to me was that apparently the credit cards were very weakly encrypted.