We all know how useful burner devices are. Burner phones are particularly known and appreciated to maintain high levels of privacy, and the same goes for free private e-mail addresses hosted by services like ProtonMail too. You’ll be anonymous after your potentially sensitive call is finished or after that valuable e-mail is sent. However, up until now there was something missing: the burner payment card. The missing piece finally fell into place thanks to Privacy.com, a service that lets you generate your own burner card to use once and throw it away. Obviously you’ll have to link it to your real bank account but if you want increased anonymity the company also allows you to use a fake name or pseudonym, although warnings are made for sketchy names possibly being declined by merchants. But the benefits are surely considerable, as well as the amount of private information the company collects from you.
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.
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.
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