Google Pay is a virtual wallet
That you don’t exactly have control of, can you freeze the card, can you destroy it or get single use cards?
Curve does but Google pay doesn’t
that is something completely different than the word virtual, which is used on the website.
More than a handful of traditional EEA/UK banks do support a single or two app-based cards (the details are listed in the app and it can be rotated). This is often framed as a “sustainable” alternative to a plastic card rather than a privacy feature. It can be rotated or closed, etc. For a more comprehensive virtual cards suite, you need to look at Bunq (up to 25 cards) or Revolut.
yeah if you want to have many cards (for reasons i do not understand) you have only those options of companies with quite terrible privacy records.
Yeah, me neither. I get by with three, provided they can be rotated on demand. It’s really not even an issue.
There are valid reasons to have many cards, for example I have cards for separate purposes and they’re not just 2 or 3, I have a few generalized but I have ones I do not trust
The list in order are:
Apple
Food delivery subscriptions
General Subscriptions
Signal
Spotify
Carrd subscription
Online shopping virtual card
Single-use and physical things
So there are valid reasons and want to have control of each of them
Then how can I pay a NextDNS sub with Google Pay?
nobody suggested you should use google pay, and we are not a helpdesk.
What do you actually get from using a per-service or per-purchase payment method? I’m genuinely curious.
well okay i should rephrase that, it has no privacy advantage. If you use if to organize your life, I guess there is a reason for some. Although many banks also offer solutions with insights and limits without the need many cards.
Are you not answering, because you are wrong?
- This is an example why Google Pay is not a virtual card formulated with a rhetorical question.
- Now but you suggest to use Curve Pay, which seems to be the same
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i am not suggesting anything. Read it again please. I am saying you should not use any of these services for privacy. I wouldn’t suggest to use curve at all. I am just saying there are others.
What do you mean what do I get?
it’s all about control, if a company decides it crosses me into some kind of payment that is BS (Exhibit Gym Memberships)
Controlled cards like these I can just terminate and say bye bye, there’s nothing wrong with say not trusting Apple or whatever and have individual cards for them
I also often freeze them and only if I decide that I wanna pay is when I unfreeze them and pay, they don’t get it otherwise
I never said you said I should use it.
You said it was an alternative to Revolut, which it is not, if you look into my example.
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not everything is about you… 
Stop the bullshit please …. and stop the ad hominem.
I never said it is about me.
We discussed Revolut and alternatives not me.
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UK seems to be the exception. Most other countries in the world do not have bank checking accounts virtual cards, including the USA.
This is an interesting situation to be honest.
We are here to help each other.
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Obviously I don’t know your spending habits, but it reminds me of people who maintain a separate email address for each service for ten years just to catch one bad actor who sold their address.
I don’t know, I maintain my subscriptions pretty well and can deal with unexpected charges. I do sometimes use a dedicated card for sketchy online shops and rotate it as soon as I’m done. Maybe you feel that way about every company.
TLDR: just like every bank in EU, it’s KYC but overall Revolut:
- is probably not worse than your local regular old-school one, at least they are a bit more honest regarding their privacy
- it has quite a few nice features + cool UX
- some tracking is there just like with everybody else, but using GOS will limit it considerably
No perfect solution besides Monero or cash/gift cards.