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.
There are cards called green dot money pak, you can only pay cash for them. Well, the kind I bought. You scratch off the back and tell somebody the number. The one I used only had a one time use. Usually I seen people giving money to people that are in jail. Or people try to scam, usually scamming old people. It is actually a good private way to send people money.
They usually have to be ‘activated’ first, which gives card vendors the opportunity to collect your information before allowing purchases. This isnt common practice yet, but I’d bet that’s coming. Even if they don’t collect your pre-activation info, the date, time and place of purchase are recorded and attached to the card. It wouldn’t be a stretch for law enforcement to request CC/security video from the merchant at the date and time of purchase. So I don’t think they offer as much privacy as cash unfortunately.
They usually have to be ‘activated’ first, which gives card vendors the opportunity to collect your information before allowing purchases.
Yah, I did have to activate the one I bought. I was able to do it over a VPN tho. Without giving any ID details like a phone or w/e, and I even tried to avoid browser fingerprinting. It’s not perfect. But for my threat model vs big-data brokers, I felt it was OK. A person might feel different if they are an enemy of the state or w/e tho :)
It wouldn’t be a stretch for law enforcement to request CC/security video from the merchant at the date and time of purchase.
That’s prob true. But I figure, that is a barrier against the commercial mass surveilence I want to avoid. I wanna fight automated, everyday surveilence as much as I can. The boring dystopia stuff. Someone trying to be all Ed Snowden, they should prob not use these. Anyway if someone’s threat model has cops requesting security video, cash has that prob too.
I agree these are not 100% rock solid vs every possible thing. It’s a tool in the toolbox tho.
Activating a CC over a VPN and then using it in person deanonymises your VPN. You’d be better off activating on a maccas WiFi.
Activating a CC over a VPN and then using it in person deanonymises your VPN
Can you explain more, what you are thinking? I agree it’s more secure to activate it in the way you say. Maybe I shoulda, lol. I’m less sure if it matters for my threat model vs boring dystopia.
When I activated the CC, they prob logged the VPN IP. But they (prob) couldn’t tie it to my name. Anyone might use the same VPN, not just me. And I can and do rotate which VPN IP I use. There is a risk here if they browserprinted me. I tried to mask that. Ofc IDK if that’s even possible to mask successfully. So that’d be a vulnerability.
In theory, a store with face recog could associate the CC with me at the time of purchase, and give that info to Visa, no matter how careful I was when activating it. I doubt that happens. But in theory it could. Tho if they are doing that, I’m not much better with cash, they can tie my purcahses to me through FR still.
Stores are always going to be capable of corroborating your presence with your card purchase, it’s how they get many longterm shoplifters. Back when I lived in the states a lot of people around me got nabbed lifting but using cash + low profile in work clothes + look smart (Just Be Asian) + blind spots + small yields never failed me. You also have to watch out for your license plate being available to them. I would imagine now you have to walk to retailers for thoroughness, account for flock etc
Of course, none of this really matters versus being one of many. They have a scale problem. Who knows how much AI can cut it down to size. Gonna be more hungry people
It doesn’t fully deanonymise you, but any activity from that VPN endpoint can be linked to your physical location (at least temporarily).
Its just another data point. If your VPN endpoint is shared it does mitigate this somewhat, but it depends how not careful everyone else is.
Gotcha thanks. The VPN I use is one of the biggest commercial ones, so I assume lots of ppl using that IP at any given moment.
It’s a good thing to think about. And yah, for more security, would be better to activate the CC in a different way.
I haven’t tried them for online shopping yet.
They mostly work from what I’ve used, but since websites are able to tell them apart from regular credit cards it’s up to them to decide. YMMV but most subscriptions won’t allow a prepaid card to be used as payment, but for one-off purchases they typically work fine
It is getting worse though. I’m getting more and more “payment processor declined card” errors while using them even on sites that used to accept them. I think in the past they’ve been kinda obscure but now they’re rising in popularity as people try to protect their privacy. And so more sites are cracking down on them
It’s kind of like VoIP numbers. They used to work for SMS verification everywhere but now it’s pretty rare to find any website that won’t detect and block them
Thank you for relating your experience. That’s similar to what I’m seeing in meatspace use.
It sucks that every privacy tool we have gets abused for scams and fraud, which causes clamp-downs. It makes me seethe at those who abuse the tools. It doesn’t just hurt their victims. Hurts everybody who wanted those tools for legit honest privacy reasons.
Been thinking about trying these and crypto for online payments. For in-person, cash is fine for most things (barring cashless kiosks like EV chargers).
