Isn’t the entire credit industry built on spying on your financial behavior to be able to decide your credit score to begin with?
That’s certainly true
Me in yurop, using a debit MasterCard, never needed a credit score. Who has my data, what are they doing with it, and how do I burn down their server?
(The answer, kids, is Stripe. Give it some years, it will be lit)
mastercard sends your transaction data live to banks. They sell your data to third parties for marketing, profiling and the likes. Credit score is the least of your problems.
I know because I developed a system, in a major European bank, enriching their transaction data with mastercard data for live, predatory marketing.
Good point. Time to gdpr my bank.
No. Privacy is illegal in the banking/financial system.
As it should be IMHO. Nothing is stopping you dropping cash for shit in the untracked economy which is massive but if you want to be a part of the larger system and all its benefits you need to be prepared to play by the rules that are designed by and large to protect people.
In the government-controlled fiat system, you are right. In Monero, you are wrong.
does your supermarket accept payments in Monero?
Your supermarket accepts payments in cash, which is better anyway.
(I say as someone who pays for certain services in Monero)
Through a giftcard, yes. I have been eating Monero since January of 2023
Ive spent years buying groceries with crypto. Just buy their gift cards with it
All of this seems straight worse than cash. Is cash not an option?
Not to people with a financial interest in promoting Monero.
Cash doesn’t work so well for online payments.
Yeah, I pay with cash unless I’m getting something delivered.
Best options by far for financial privacy are cash and Monero.
How can you buy things with monero? What merchants (online or in person) accept it?
More and more merchants are beginning to accept it directly and you can check out the Monerica directory, XMRBazaar or Monero Market to find them. If you cannot find what you need directly for monero then you can get thousands of merchant gift cards from Coinsbee, Coin Cards, or Cake Pay.
Excellent! Thank you!
Glad I could help.
You could maybe use the service AnonShop as mentioned in the Closed NTWRK podcast
Check Monero to gift cards websites there’s a lot of there. Spotify, amazon, Walmart…
The whole point is that everything is in an official ledger, that can be argued over in front of a judge.
Best you can do is say you don’t consent for your data to be sold. Find a smaller bank or a credit union where they have to give a shit about their customers.
Doesn’t your credit card provider still get all your data?
E.g. doesn’t visa/mastercard know about every transaction? They charge fees and they have a fraud prevention systems. So, I think, they do, right?
Clarifying privacy from whom could help identify possible solution.
Buy a prepaid visa with cash. Not technically a credit card, but it may be what you’re looking for.
Probably the closest thing you can get to in terms of a “privacy” credit card. Everything about a credit card is tied to you by their very nature. So it depends on what or who you want privacy from.
Someone else mentioned privacy.com which I also use - it’s good if you want to hide your transaction from the credit card company, or if you want to hide your identity from the merchant. But Privacy.com is more like a virtual debit card that connects to your bank account. Privacy.com still knows who you are.
Your identity, most of the time, is not revealed to the merchant. The payments online and through a credit-card machine are processed through a 3rd party. The seller doesn’t get your info, only money on their bank account.
That’s a good idea
Most major American sites no longer accept these and they have become finnicky including locking the card so you have to call the call center to reopen the lock. This is due to curb laundering. Walmart in person works. Gas stations work. Used to work everywhere now, not much.
No. Your best bet is with something like privacy.com or mysudo.
Edit: grammar
I use privacy.com but it only links to debit cards FYI
This, also a lot of credit card companies support virtual cards, American express does this, so does capital one. I’m sure there are others.
Cash
I don’t know what you’re referring to exactly, but for me, I like using normal credit cards through Apple Pay because the recipient doesn’t get your actual credit card number and a different number is used each time
But Apple does and sees all the transactions so I don’t know whether it’s better privacy wise
Well, so does your credit card company and they sell that info to the same companies Apple does, so nothing is really lost but a little is gained.
Really, there’s not much private about credit cards at all, so idk what’s with this thread…
And they’re not doing it to protect their customers. They’re doing it so only they have this data.
Google Wallet, formally Google Pay, formally GPay, formally Android Pay, formally Google Wallet, formally Android Wallet, does the same thing.
Switching phones and returning something was such a pain since it generated an entirely new number.
The credit card company and everybody buying that data from them still does though, probably, which for me is the bigger concern.
ITT: OP is figuring the opsec of paying for corn
7$ a dozen now from the farmer down the street from my parents. Inflation is wild!
About a month ago I got a dozen for $3 from a neighbor. Delicious!
I’m jelly
That’s a great question if also been wondering for some time now. Obviously I can pay in cash, and only in XMR, no problems there. But when my cash runs out, how do I get the cash out of my bank account privately? I can’t go to an ATM with XMR or Google/Apple pay. Also then they know information I don’t want them to have. If I use my bank card the bank still knows where I am and how much cash I spent in a specific time frame. Anyone hast ideas on how to withdraw cash private?
There’s no real way to do it. Unless you know someone who can trade you XMR<->cash and you somehow convince your employer to (break laws and) pay you in those forms, you can’t avoid it. At some point, you’ll have to get money on a real bank account, which requires real information to open.
Thanks for the answer, best option then is probably to always use the same ATM where I live and at least be a bit less traceable that way. But yeah this system sucks…
Yeah withdraw cash from an ATM and use it. The system sucks, but it’s not trivial to change for a myriad of reasons.
As a sidenote here I have a different issue where handing people your CC info is basically handing out the private keys to your bank account to a third party.
I’d really like it if a credit card would use a public key system where you can verify that I have the funds and that the payment originates from the payment provider instead of getting my full CC details. I don’t really see why it’s necessary for a business to know who I am instead of just getting a green light from Mastercard or Visa to make the payment.
Aren’t cellphone NFC payment essentially a long-form version of this? As far as the machine is concerned they’re getting your CC info, but Google/Samsung/Apple Pay are acting as a middleman and your actual credit card information is never actually shared.
Yeah, it has it’s perks but my NFC stops working on a regular basis. Also I don’t like having my payments go through a spyware conglomerate.
As far as I know, modern cards don’t just send your CC info to terminals, they do some form of a cryptographic handshake (probably a pubkey signature or similar) which gets confirmed by your bank. I believe Caveman was talking more about online shopping, where you have to enter your card number, expiration date, CVC and often your name too.
I’ve run across a few sites that allow me to check out entirely through Google Pay or PayPal, but not many. I still don’t love the info going through Google, but at this point they already have all my information, so it doesn’t really make much of a difference at this point.
And of course for anything that needs to be shipped they are going to need a name and shipping address.
I would like to seeegally mandatory “guest checkout” options with protections on data use. They’ll need to keep some kind of invoice/receipt of the transaction, but it should be illegal to use it for any other purposes than order/purchase tracking for guest accounts.
That’s why I love virtual card systems like MB NET. You just generate a random virtual card for every purchase (or a recurring one for each subscription vendor, for example) and move on. Your bank still knows what you’re doing, of course, but vendors can’t correlate anything. Preventing your bank from knowing where you’re spending your money is much harder, for very practical reasons: fraud detection. The only real way is to use a secure crypto coin like Monero, but very few places accept it and you still have to deal with volatility.
I think crypto has a lot of potential in this space. You can effectively have a wallet with cash that requires 2 factor auth to make the transaction that is anonymous in both directions.
This is my biggest issue too. In the ideal situation, I “trust” my bank. What I have an issue with is whenever I buy something it becomes part of the “public space” of data brokers. Maybe they only trade information on what my breakfast cereal of choice is. More (most definitely) likely is that everything I buy is there for any third party to see
All the banks here use an inter-banking system that allows for virtual credit cards, they can be use once or periodic, always single-merchant and always capped.
Its called monero. You can buy gift cards with it
You can buy gift cards with monero??
Yes.
I need to know how this is done
Check the gift cars section of Monerica
