The info blurb about privacy.com says that some plans have an option to hide transaction information from a bank.
Their paid plans provide higher limits on the number of cards that can be created each month and the option to hide transaction information from your bank.
Their paid “discreet merchants” feature hides merchant information from your bank, so your bank only sees that a purchase was made with Privacy.com, but not where that money was spent.
However, the knowledge base section about virtual cards says:
They do not assist you in making a purchase completely anonymously, nor do they hide any information from the banking institution themselves.
(Emphasis mine)
And when I look at privacy.com’s different plans, I don’t see anything about hiding merchant info from the bank.
What’s going on here? Is this dated information, or a misunderstanding on my part?
Well, logic says it is outdated info. The main page is more likely to be accurate. I do remember privacy.com having that feature of hiding info from your bank but apparently not anymore. I no longer use it so I can’t confirm.
So does this mean my bank can see everything I do with a PMS in detail, or just which merchants I’m sending money to? This FAQ article says that bank statements from Privacy purchases will look like "PWP*{Merchant information}"or “PWP*Privacy {Transaction date}”.
The feature was not discontinued, they moved it to the free plan and its available for everyone by default now. This happened around September of last year.
Edit: purchases show as “POS DEBIT PWP*PRIVACY” year-mo-da" “number string-state” "
It isn’t mentioned anywhere I saw, and I looked everywhere on their site that I thought it would make sense for that information to be. This includes the plans page, the pages explaining virtual cards, and the FAQ page under Transactions
Oh yeah, it was that last part of their email I was remembering. I just got a chance to double-check my privacy.com account and the option is available
Sorry, I misread your original post.
When the knowledge base article references “the banking institution” it is referring to the institution that issued the virtual card.
In this scenario, “the banking institution” we are talking about is privacy.com themselves.
When you use privacy.com with private spend mode enabled, it shouldn’t send any information to your bank. We just think it is important to remember that privacy.com themselves still has all that information. You are shifting trust from your bank to privacy.com.
