Hacker News Reader

Comment by open592 | Hacker News Reader

What are you going to replace it with for internet purchases?

I've already dramatically reduced the amount of stuff I buy online. For things I have to buy online, I can just use one-time-use cards.

Like store bought gift cards, or an online service? If the latter, you're just shofting your trust somewhere else (which may be what you want, but it's worth making that explicitly understood).

Store bought, if I have planned ahead. A temporary card that's a feature of my bank if I haven't.

> If the latter, you're just shofting your trust somewhere else

Of course -- I'm shifting it to a bank that I already use. So, it still represents a privacy gain in that I'm cutting PayPal out and not bringing anybody new in.

Quite a few banks, like Capital One, let you create one-time-use or temporary cards in their apps. So, not really shifting trust outside of the bank providing the account to begin with.

Well before the bank would only see your transfers to PayPal, rather than where you're actually spending your money. You're shifting trust in the sense that it used to be PayPal seeing where you're spending your money to your bank seeing where you're spending your money.

Yes, but my bank already has deep insight into my spending habits anyway. Eliminating PayPal reduces the number of companies surveilling me by one. That seems like a net gain to me.

And that's not even taking into account that I trust my bank more than I trust PayPal.

Manually typing credit card numbers?

Autofill makes it a lot easier as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com