Privacy.com Burner Cards for Safe Online Payments

Privacy.com’s services

Privacy.com is an American company which, for now, keeps its services within the country’s borders. They create burner cards for you to use once or several times with a specific merchant, giving you the chance of also setting transaction limits. There are different cards for each of your individual needs: the regular cards are the standard type of card created by default which – as advised by the company – are meant for using at a merchant you trust regularly, with the added ability of being able to cancel it at any time. Burner cards, however, are your disposable payment method for a merchant you don’t trust 100% since these will be locked “upon completion of the first transaction and cannot be used again”. Furthermore, with this type of card no merchant is able to gain access to any of your working payment information, so anonymity is guaranteed. There is also an option of using a Privacy.com card to subscribe for a service and avoiding to pay more than agreed if the company decides to change their fees.

Setting your transaction limits is extra handy when you go for a trial with product such as a VPN or a registry cleaner since once these trial periods end, you can be automatically charged your first monthly subscription, depending on the provider. However, if you use one of Privacy.com’s burner cards, not a dime will be pulled from your pocket without your permission.

Personal information collected at Privacy.com

Regardless of how interesting this service is, you should also pay close attention to what information Privacy.com collects about you when you use their services. The company stores data you provide such as “name, email address, phone number, birth date, last four digits of social security number, payment card and bank information”. Furthermore, other types of information are also logged, such as transaction data (devices and payment methods used, etc.), device data (hardware model, operating system, unique device identifiers…), location, user data (browser data, IP address…), cookies and beacons. Last but not least, Privacy.com shares your data with third party companies, financial institutions, government and law enforcements in order to assure a completely legal process. However, the good news here is that you need to give your prior consent.