Paypal allows you to create a business account which hides your real name, showing only a business name/alias.
Paypal will know who you are but others wont…
Why not?
Seems the best option for when you want to buy or sell without revealing your name to other person in transaction…
Because Paypal is one of the worst offenders in the shitty company category. You are effectively fucked if you encounter an issue and don’t have a big social media following to brow beat them into helping you.
use Apple pay.
just see their security/privacy page for payments, you will know why.
I’m not going to advocate in favor of PayPal but I don’t think this is an option for many that are out of the Apple ecosystem.
Is the OP looking for some alternatives to PayPal? If not the comments above scratch the surface of why as a privacy tool PayPal let’s to desire.
Some items to consider:
Users have limited control over their data on PayPal, including the ability to opt-out of certain data collection practices or manage their marketing preferences.
Although PayPal has implemented security measures to protect user data, the company has experienced data breaches in the past.
Business accounts on PayPal actually may share more data than personal accounts, even if it doesn’t disclose personal names it may share customer and merchant profiles, purchases, and sales data.
In terms of trust it would be hard for me to choose paypal when something like privacy.com is available.
as @deviancy points out you can easily get locked out of your account for arbitrary reasons just ask Proton
Yeah, I’m in the same predicament. Not only do I use Android (and would like to avoid using iPhones as much as possible), but all the masking services recommended here are only available in the US.
As someone from the UK, I’m using physical (Monzo / AMEX) or virtual (Revolut) cards right now. Sometimes, I would use BitCoin / Monero if the vendors accept crypto. I don’t use PayPal as much, but I would use that before bank transfer.
I can’t seem to find similar options to Privacy.com in the UK. Some retailers don’t even accept cash any more. So I’m forced to trust all of these companies with my data and transactions when making any payments.
sadly, as far as I am aware, the UK doesn’t really have an alternative.
When I’ve used Paypal in the past, just for like normal (not anonymous) purchases, I’ve ran into problems when trying to get my card to go through. And their customer support is literally shit for me. I’ll message them, and it’ll take like 3-4 hours for them to respond, and then apparently they stop answering messages altogether past 5:00 pm eastern time. So given their reply rate I might could send them two messages per day before I’d have to wait until the next day for a response. Contrast that to my bank account’s customer support, I may have to wait 5 minutes at the most. I’ve seen other people complaining with similar problems in the past. So for reasons not even related to privacy I hate Paypal. YMMV though, I won’t discount anyone who says they’ve had a positive experience with the service, it’s just I’ve yet to find a person who’s said Paypal is awesome, lol. If anonymity isn’t necessarily important to you and you’re just trying to pay for something that doesn’t leave a trace on your bank statement you could fund a cashapp wallet and spend it through cashapp. Again, this isn’t anonymous, but the purchases won’t show up on your bank statement. In case you have like a shared bank account or something. Cashapp for purchases under 1,000 USD also don’t require KYC. The only downside is I don’t think cashapp is as accepted by various businesses like Paypal is.