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Privacy.com — Get a new virtual card for every transaction
Privacy.com is an innovative way to protect your personal information over the internet. Are you feeling uncomfortable using your credit card online? Privacy.com has the perfect solution - it creates a virtual card that masks your bank statements for your online payments.
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this tool looks awesome. I previously paid Blur $5 a month for such functionality, but they started adding in stupid fees and were slow to adopt ACH.
@bolingj how do you handle merchants issuing refunds to the cards?
@_jacksmith same boat here. Dropped Blur when they started tacking on the $2 fee per transaction. They lost a long-term customer overnight. Really was a shame. Stoked to try this one out tho.
@anodigital yeah, I had been using them for a long time as well. I even requested access to their ACH beta program but months later they still wouldn't onboard me. such a shame. The annoying thing with Blur is that they also tried to do loads of other things like mask all your passwords, so the chrome extension was very intrusive.
Great product! And I have to say the domain and the landing page are pretty cool as well :) Any plans to launch outside of the US?
Just curious what fees are associated with this or how you guys are covering the cost of ach/processing/plaid auth, etc. & and if you could go into a bit of detail about your business model?
Great execution. Just curious though, is there way to track the transaction to the original credit card or is it some sort o encrypted?
And BTW, that's a great domain you have. How did you get it? 🙈
Whenever I see a compelling product that depends on my sharing my bank account number I am always disappointed. In a world where database breaches are the norm, having your bank account number shared with numerous startups opens me up to a very costly kind of fraud http://www.nbcnews.com/id/791415... I'm really jelous of the sanity around bank account transaction the european countries enjoy. In the US, incredibly we have zero security around this. Once someone has your account number they can drain your whole bank account.
I first learned of this danger from Donald Knuth's writings here http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.e...
Any plans to add support for using a debit card (even with a fee? I'd be willing to pay)?
This is really smart but any plan for future support of linking credit cards vs bank account? Gotta get those points.
@ourielohayon thanks for sticking with us! hopefully we managed to resolve those issues :)
I've been working on the PR for this and, as I said to Bo repeatedly, it's a product I now use all the time. I've been privileged to use it during beta and it's fantastic. I've been using it to let a contractor buy materials for a house project - and can see if he decides to go to Arby's or something randomly on it. It's so awesome.
Glad to see this concept come back around! Hopefully, you do it right.
in around 1997-98 the bank I was at launched a version of this, called one-time account numbers - it was very popular even though you had to come to our website, enter all the details of the transaction and get a unique one-time account number to use for that specific transaction on some merchants website... It was cancelled once we had enough data to see exactly what people were using it for... internal code name 'kid porn card' though it was more often drugs... still, lots of porn too.
Since you are touting privacy of the transactions how are you monitoring for illegal activity? Eventually, the Feds are going to ask for transactions details. It didn't go well when the NSA asked the encrypted email service for a key they could not (would not) provide - they took the service down.
It's a cool idea and could likely stop all kinds of common fraud though banks do a very good job of shutting that down immediately these days. Github is the only website that causes me a problem, every single month I get a fraud alert for that account, they have way too many chargebacks apparently :D
@bolingj Given that browsers store card numbers for you so auto-fill is already easy enough plus how good card issuers are these days at real-time fraud protection what is the specific problem that the company is attempting to solve?
@helloduane Thanks for the thoughtful post!
First off - for folks doing something illegal that may result in a subpoena, this is not the product for you 😬. As a US financial services product we do have to abide by AML / KYC.
Broadly speaking, there's 2 points that we think are compelling:
1) We just think that you just shouldn't have to share your personal info with a random merchant you want to buy something from. This notion that passing along your billing info is going some how substantially cutting down on fraud is ridiculous. It's anti-privacy in the guise of being anti-fraud.
2) We like the idea that multiple numbers puts the control back in your hands as a consumer. You can track down and see exactly which merchant stole/leaked your info. You don't have to update all your cards at every site every time your card is used fraudulently. And lastly, you can set limits per card, so you don't have to deal with some shady merchant billing you without consent or slipping in a hidden charge (it happens alot!).
Hope that helps!
@bolingj lol - yes, that's true - it's not for people doing illegal things but they will do them, and FYI if you are doing something stupid like that then use CASH :D
It's a hard thing to say that I should not trust merchant 1 when you are the middle man in the process that is unknown. I would have to have more trust in your company than PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, etc... or Apple/FireFox/Chrome (not that I have much trust in PayPal mind you..)
If it were launching in China, Iran, Middle East, etc. then I would agree more with you on the privacy stance.... Ultimately your bank doesn't care what you do as long as you pay your bill (hopefully only a portion of the balance and if at all possible paid late)
As for tracking down which merchant did what, the bank, police are going to do that for you - you don't need to worry about it. In general you are covered, bank issues a new card, refunds your money, etc. There is no point knowing it was the car rental place because the employee who stole your card already split or is already in jail once you find out about it from the bank who calls/tests to tell you about a suspicious charge from Cheap'n Easy Car Rental Service Inc. right?
None the less will be interesting to see how this goes. Best of luck to you!
That's the kind of products that make you smile 5 seconds after landing in the homepage. Few words, 1 illustration and boom: you feel a pain going away. Great job Boling.
@kachchani I concur. The entire onboarding process from sign up through linking a bank account to paying on Watsi is absolutely beautiful.
Privacy.com is perfect for free trials. No more setting a calendar reminder to cancel your account.
Just create a burner card with a $1 limit, and the whole cancellation process will work itself out. 😬
Pros:Prevents your credit card from being stolen. Perfect for free trials.
Cons:Can't be used for in-store transactions like Final.com
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