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Comment by kidlogic | Hacker News Reader

I'ved used Privacy.com for a few years now and it is a superbly excellent tool. I highly recommend their product for personal and business use.

Privacy and helps keep track of subscription expenses and helps me maintain/be aware budget and/or subscription increases.

The only downside occurs when you are trying to process a refund for a card that was already closed.

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I really wanted to be a customer, but when I visited privacy.com and saw the number of 3P services they load up (thanks uBlock Origin) I realized that they talk the talk but don't walk the walk.

I only see fonts.googleapis.com on the main homepage https://privacy.com, although plausible.io is indeed loaded on blog.privacy.com.

Maybe it's better now? Last I checked was ~a year ago, I could be out of date.

>I realized that they talk the talk but don't walk the walk.

Not to mention that their product does nothing against tracking by the card networks themselves eg. https://datafloq.com/read/mastercard-applies-big-data-help-r.... If you want "privacy", your best bet is a prepaid card bought with cash.

I use the service. The name of the service is sort of misleading advertising. In reality what you get is protection from theft of a card number when shopping online (this is what happened to make me decide to use the service), spend limits on reusable cards (for something you pay a recurring payment for, this comes in handy when a merchant raises their rates and doesn't tell you) and you can use any name and region and so protect your identity from being sold by merchants to advertising firms.

Your bank still has access to everything (and they sell everything, of course) and the service itself also has access to everything. But all in all it is a good layer of insulation from merchants and vendors and has some useful features. Think of it like a VPN service for card payments.

That was my hope, except that you don't usually have to dox yourself to VPN providers to get an account, unlike this one.

Another solution that's been around for a lot longer - and with more features, but less catchy name - is Abine Blur - https://www.abine.com Disclosure: I was one of the co-founders In general, there is a tradeoff between the anti-fraud and the privacy requirements in payment processing, and pseudo-anonymous onetime cards are a good solution.

Does it preserve the underlying benefits of the card (cashback, points, etc.)?

It isnt for credit cards. Only debit.

They take your points/cashback and in return shield your transaction info from your bank and vendor, that's their business model unless you sign up for one of their paid plans.

That's not how it works at all. How would that even work?

They make their money from the same fee merchants pay to any other card issuer.

https://support.privacy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360012046114-H...

That merchant-facing fee is how you earn cashback/points when you're a credit card holder. Instead of passing it on to you in the form of points or cash back, Privacy.com keeps it.

> Card issuers can afford to pay cash back because merchants pay an interchange fee on each transaction.

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/cash-rebate-cre...

Well that fee is what pays for points/cash back. So although they're not literally taking them, they are taking the fees that would have funded them. So they are in effect taking them.

That's idiotic. If I rob a carnival of cash have I also robbed them of ride tickets?

You stand between the carnival operator and the riders holding up a curtain so they can't see each other. In exchange for this anonymizing service you take a 1% cut of each transaction, then spend it on a ride yourself at the end of the day. The 1% cut is priced into the operator's ticket prices so they still make enough profit, and is practically invisible to the rider, but if the service did not exist, then the tickets could be sold 1% cheaper. This is the model, whether or not you call it "taking" the 1% or "adding on" the 1% is inconsequential.

Doesn’t appear to, it was almost a killer app for me. I hate giving out my CC details online, but I love the benefits

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