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Comment by vinger | Hacker News Reader

But paying for a service connects your real world credit profile to this transaction. I feel privacy is already broken with the credit card companies selling this information.

When someone tracks you and you don't pay they will try to link your online activities and identify other activities online to tailor an ad to you.

I can confuse and lie to the second group but I can't hide from the first group.

Anything that requires you to pay by credit card means you are already being tracked. For privacy I'm against pay services.

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I'm not worried about a company knowing I am their customer, with some name and credit card number.

I'm worried about them participating in the global privacy free for all where they sell my info everywhere and abusively correlate it with the info others have to learn things about me.

Search terms are a particularly rich source of this sort of thing.

I don't think "privacy" is much about keeping all info away from people, I think it's about the correlation. Keeping info away is a natural and sensible precaution in an environment of rampant correlation, but if that didn't exist I wouldn't need to resort to complete information starvation.

YMMV.

The credit card company is the one selling your relationships and purchase habits and they know exactly who you are and can connect you to everything else important in your life.

Services like Privacy.com offer single purpose credit cards which can help mitigate the linking of an account to a payment source.

Now you have to trust privacy.com and still worry about the others.

True, although it does shift some of the parties you need to trust. It’s not a perfect solution but, I think, it’s a good solution given what’s currently available. At least privacy.com is a central company which bases its reputation on privacy and as such has an incentive to avoid reputational harm.

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”

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