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.

Idea sounds neat, but in my opinion the less people have your information the better. Seems like just another opportunity for a company to get hacked and loose all your information.

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 the virtual card 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.

I have used the privacy.com masking service for a long time, and I prefer above its competitors.

The service is not good at hiding your transactions from, say, a government, but it’s sufficiently good at keeping your identity and money safe from rogue companies.

• When purchasing, the vendor does not get your bank account details, they get a disposable debit card number that you can set usage limits to; it is also restricted to the first vendor that uses it
• The bank does not get details about what company you are purchasing things from; all it knows is that money went to PrivacyCom.

This service has saved my butt before. Once, I tried purchasing an old DVD off a schedule website for a physical place. The purchase never went through, but I had a $200 attempted purchase for “sewing machine” to the same masked card. It failed, because I set a limit of roughly $30 to the card. Then a second charge, for $1, almost went through… Except, by this point, the card had been locked to “sewing machine” and the fraudulent charges were no longer able to start.

Of course, if another service comes along with similar features to Privacy, with a similar cost, and perhaps a couple extra features (for example, Privacy could use a better privacy policy)! I would go pretty quickly to the superior service. It’s a little unfortunate that the competition is relatively minimal in the USA.

Been using it for a few years but recently they have been requiring way more info than i feel comfortable giving out so dont use them much anymore. It used to work like an online wallet that you just deposit money into with no need to input your personal information which to me fit just fine with the “privacy.com” namesake but now you have to kyc all of your info including SS number which im not a fan of. Dont see the benefit if there really is no privacy anymore. Using it for temp cards for trials and such that are easy to cancel sure but not much more than that.

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).

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.) 😅

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.

Can I use it from EU?

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.

In Portugal, pretty much everyone has access to this functionality. I think the functionality is amazing, I use it very often. The fact the cards only work once and have a spending limit really gives me a sense of security.

Revolut also has this functionality, I use it for purchases in foreign currency.

Never heard of privacy.com, I’m already set with the services that provide this functionality. I can’t say if the service is good or not, but the practice of creating virtual credit cards is invaluable.

Would be nice if it was available worldwide. I have no options for virtual credit cards like that in my country. I’ve been using banking alot for daily transactions but will probably switch back to carrying cash again for smaller things.

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.

I don’t as there is a service called blik in my country which seems private enough and is way more hassle free to use. It generates one time use codes for payment and requires user confirmation for each payment. Not sure how private it is on the back end, but it pretty much gets rid of the same risks virtual credit cards target. It’s also pretty well supported, both by banks and payment processors.

Again not sure how private it is on the back end, but, at least for me, its more user friendly than using a credit card so I cant be bothered.

Edit: the privacy policy for both blik and their website (I think?) is 13 pages, 9 of which give a detailed description of how they use cookies. Also the privacy regulations here are quite strict and they actually follow them, so you can not opt into cookies with as much effort as it takes to opt in. It is also a service made by banks, so I feel its quite trust wordy.

Also OP, if the banks web extention doesn’t require access to all websites, it probably won’t track you, at least more than your bank tracks you already.

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.