Hello privacy experts! Needing a sanity check here.
I don’t use privacy.com but considering it for a Temu purchase. I recall buying stuff from China before from another site (maybe AliExpress). I got my order but next thing I know I’ve got bogus CC charges and spam mails through the roof.
Now I’m looking at a couple of pieces of equipment, one is around $1000 and the other $2000. It’s a lot, but about 1/5th of buying locally.
So I was thinking… maybe I can add a privacy.com card to my paypal account. If either gets hacked I don’t care as it will be a single use card. But I don’t think privacy.com has the buyer protections that paypal does.
Would that work? Can privacy.com be used for a purchase overseas? I guess paypal is going to give out any info on me that they have, so email and address. Hopefully not phone number too.
If I use a credit for privacy.com then maybe I have at least double protection coverage?
This whole point of privacy.com is to obfuscate what you are purchasing from a payment service provider (PSP) - issuing bank will ultimately still know however. If you put the card on PayPal, you are probably going to the route that information through PayPal, have it process with privacy.com (or depending on the integration skip this step?), and then contacts your issuing bank for authorization.
Perhaps PayPal wi have less data on a specific virtual card, but ultimately PayPal will still effectively be a MITM seeing everything you purchase on that card. Maybe it’s ok for you, but something to consider.
Anyways, with this I’m not sure what you are solving in a privacy perspective. It sounds like you are trying to figure out buyer protection stuff, which isn’t really a privacy question. This sounds like a support question to maybe direct to PayPal or privacy.com?
As far as I know, Privacy can be used anywhere that will accept a US debit card. See Can I use Privacy Cards on international purchases? If you are concerned about fraudulent charges I’d use the privacy card directly and lock it to a merchant with a fixed spending limit. Any place that attempts to use the card will be declined. You can go the extra step and close the card after your item has been delivered. The drawback, you wouldn’t be able to create a new card for the same merchant in the future (this protects merchants from free trial abuse). I’d recommend pausing the card when you are done with it instead of closing it. The difference being you can unpause the card at any time and use it again for the same merchant.
As for the email, I’d use an email alias. See Privacy Guides Email Aliasing recommendations. You create an email alias with whatever provider you chose (Addy, SimpleLogin). You will link your aliases to your real email. When you place your order, use the email alias you created (beware, some merchants will block aliases created by SimpleLogin as fraud, try making a new alias with a different domain SimpleLogin offers). The merchant will not have your real email only the alias. The email alias service will forward any email it receives to your real email. You can turn off the alias when you are done.
Thank you Providenci_Zulauf17. I can use an email alias easy enough, and it looks like privacy.com will solve the card abuse before it can happen. I will try that. Thanks!
