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Comment by llaolleh | Hacker News Reader

It's a little ironic that privacy.com is asking for your SSN lol.

Privacy.com is to firewall you from service providers, not the government. There is no way around KYC/AML if you’re operating legally.

I’m not American. I opened a U.S. bank account with a major U.S. bank (I.e., presumed to be operating legally) without a SSN or US address. I have no other US identification or number.

There is no way around know your customer, but that doesn’t mean “requires SSN”. That’s just the easiest path from point A to point B and most businesses don’t care to support anything else.

I wouldn't say it's the easiest path, but a critical path. A social security number is usually required to provide identity resolution confidence (name, birth date, and address are insufficient). Don't take my word for it, that's straight from the Internal Revenue Service's Privacy Impact Assessment for it's ID.me identity proofing partner [1].

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pia/id-me-pia.pdf (Pages 2-3)

I'm also not American and I was able to open a US bank account without a SSN, however they instead put in a dummy SSN of 300-00-0000. I suppose your bank might have also given you a dummy number like that.

Yeah, a bit. Despite that, I still perceive them as a good barrier (and defense) between my personal financial account and random online businesses whom I would very much like to not provide any personal info whatsoever. An example is wanting to buy a LOSSLESS album from Bandcamp, I can use Privacy and I don't even need to give the musician or Bandcamp my real name or actual financial details.

I was under the assumption you never need to give your real name when using a debit or credit card. Zip code and the number of the address like 7 for "7 Main St" are required usually.

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