Have you tried them for privacy purposes? What are your experiences?
Here is mine. I’ve used the Visa prepaid cards. Where I live (USA) you can buy them “anonymously”. Scare quotes because sure, nothing is 100% anonymous now. But you can buy them with cash and activate them without giving a phone #. Not quite as anonymous as cash, but close. It avoids the heavy data trail of a normal CC. And you can use them sometimes where you can’t use cash.
But there’s the prob. It’s hit and miss if they work. Unfortunately, these are HUGE among scammers, so those scammer fucks poisoned the well. Some stores will flat out deny them. Other times, they work fine.
I’ve had probs at some point of sale terminals, others work OK. Ditto gas pumps. Seems to be no way to know which way it’ll go without trying. Which means you gotta have another way to pay lined up.
I haven’t tried them for online shopping yet.
depending on your use case, check out privacy.com
they offer digital cards that act as proxies to your bank. if there’s ever a vendor breach, payment information on you is not the same between any two vendors. you can limit your cards to single-use, merchant locked, and set spend limits.
this service is not anonymous as they need your bank details.
Oh. I use a similar one called Ironvest. They also have masked cards to use. But they’re virtual cards so I can’t use them in meatspace.
I tried to sign up for privacy.com. They I send a digital copy of my photo ID to a 3rd party! I said no thanks. Ironvest is also not anonymous ofc. But they never demanded a copy of my ID. They confirmed me in other ways. I’ve had it a long time. I dunno if they would require it now for new signups or what. But I never had to.
I wouldn’t even mind except nobodys shit is secure. I send ID to whatever identity resolver privacy.com uses, and only a matter of time till it leaks to every identity thief.
good call. if they’re asking for photoID I will stop recommending them
I think it might depend. When I complained, they implied they do it for some ppl, and not others. And they won’t tell you why you triggered it.
My guess, just a guess, is if somebody is too much off-radar already, then you trigger a risk score since there’s not a massive data trail in the big data brokers. Once you hit a threshold, they demand more info from you.
IDK how much or little it happens tho.
it might be because you were trying to access via VPN. if you have a residential IP to exit from or you can go to a library or something to try and sign up from there, I bet this wouldn’t trigger.