Privacy.com is not about hiding your identity from authorities.
It's mostly about hiding the fact that the same person, you, are paying to merchant A and merchant B. It allows you to easily have a card per merchant, and lock it to the merchant so that when its number is stolen, it can't be used anywhere else.
>It allows you to easily have a card per merchant, and lock it to the merchant so that when its number is stolen, it can't be used anywhere else.
In my experience even that can fail. I had a card number stolen from them, charged to the tune of $200+, and their support refused to even entertain the idea of it being fraud, and when I mentioned a chargeback they basically said "we don't do those, because we have contracts with vendors."
>I had a card number stolen from them, charged to the tune of $200+
I'm curious, how did this happen specifically? In my experience, all privacy.com virtual cards default to being merchant-locked to the first place you use them. Did the merchant run an unauthorized transaction on the card?
I've had online payment info compromised once, and privacy.com caught it cold (and also clearly demonstrated that the vendor had mishandled the payment info, despite claiming otherwise).
Honestly no clue, different vendor than the card was setup for.
This was during a big wave of unauthorized activity being attempted on their cards as well, a lot of friends reported blocked charges for random amounts at like a retirement/hospice home(?) at the time.
This was like 3+ years ago, and my only guess now (read: can't remember if this is true) is that the card had never been charged to the merchant, only pre-authed. But even then I'd expect the pre-auth to lock it to a merchant.
> Making it harder, rather than easier, to chargeback fraudulent uses is not what I'm looking for.
Honestly I'm still confused by the whole thing.
I told them that it was a fraudulent transaction that I didn't approve, they then kept asking me for tracking numbers and finally closed the support ticket, and would close any further ones instantly on me with this reply.
Never mind the fact that it was a completely separate issue than what they would keep replying to me about, the fact that they included the line of
> At this point, the only possibility is that the shipment was stolen after the delivery. This is no longer a case where the merchant is at fault. Hence, the case would be concluded in the merchant's favor.
is a complete disregard for visa's rules. The fact that they wouldn't even let me open a dispute is the biggest factor of "wtf" here to me.
Visa is probably easier to deal with in the case of fraud than what it sounds like privacy.com is like.
I use a single CC for everything (that I'm willing to pay with a CC for.) It's been compromised to the point that charges went through 2-3 times over the past decade and a half. CC company caught the fraud each time, automatically charged-back each of the fraudulent transactions, and overnighted me a new card. They also moved all of my recurring charges to my new card (somehow.) From what I understand, all of the big 4 CC companies operate more or less the same in this regard.
This thread has eliminated the chance of me using Privacy.com in the future. If they can't make dealing with fraud at least as easy as a regular CC (which is quite painless, there's no reason to use them.
I have never had to actually pay for any fraud, the bank's fraud detection alwasy catches it, it's never even showed up on my bill.
But I end up having to cancel and get a new credit or debit card about once a year. And this actually is really inconvenient, when you think of all the places you have stored a CC that have to be updated.
I guess my bank doesn't do automatic updates of any recurring subscriptions, I've always had to deal with it manually. (And in charitable contributions, amazon, paypal, stripe, grubhub, etc etc etc).
That was making me consider privacy.com instead... but if I'm doing it cause of that fraud inconvenience, which right now is just an inconvenience which I have no worry whatsoever would result in actual $$ (cause it's happened so many times now and it's never even been a threat), and switching to privacy.com may eliminate having to update card numbers everywhere when fraud happens but actually increases my risk of actually being out the $$ (or increases the amount of time I have to spend dealing or fighting with customer service or fraud recovery support anywhere) -- forget it.
As somebody who doesn't use any of these services, your request for somebody to contact you at a lithic.com address in response to concerns about privacy.com issues is uh.... well, it reads like the 3rd slide in a corporate SCORM annual "phishing awareness" training.
hey jimmy grapes, sorry to hear you had a bad experience with a Lithic employee. Please email us at lithic@gmail.com with your SSN and mothers maiden name and we'll have this dealt with shortly
Lithic is our parent company - you can also drop me a line at rachel@privacy.com. Both end up in the same space. If you interested in reading more about the rebrand and difference in the two business feel free to check out this blog post: https://blog.privacy.com/our-journey-from-privacy-com-to-lit...
My concern wasn't that Privacy.com knows who is using their service, but with rather how they choose to know that information through a third party (Onfido) and how terrible Onfido's privacy policy is.
Recently I've signed up with Paddle, and they have opted to verify user identities with Onfido, so they have asked for a government ID and a selfie. I have contacted Paddle and refused to provide a selfie, so they eventually asked me to upload my ID too in place of a selfie and manually approved the submission.
Paddle has no excuse for collecting selfies, they are providing services to businesses that can be verified in more humane and secure ways, such as an electronic signature.
Verifying people with selfies is a degrading and insecure practice, especially when you encounter Onfido during the installation process of a bank's app that you already have an account with, opened in person at a local branch in the EU. This bank also asks you to create a video of yourself and submit your speech to configure their mobile banking app. I'm sure the data will be useful for someone when Onfido eventually gets hacked, or just sells your biometric data.
My hope is that biometric data collection for online account verification will become illegal once all EU member states have intoduced electronic IDs which have an NFC chip. The verification should consist of a person holding their ID next to their phone, and the online service would only receive the minimum amount of personal data to complete the verification.
This is not how it works. Your NFC ID card establishes that a person that looks like X is named Y. That’s fine, that’s what we get, just less reliably, from a photo of your passport. You will still need to smile for the camera to establish that a) you look sufficiently close to X and b) you appear to be a live human being (as opposed to a photo being held to the camera)
The image of your face and the image (NFC capture) of your ID are stored to prove to auditors that you were indeed verified to required standards.
No one wants your mugshot, it’s a legal requirement they are having to satisfy.
Selfies are collected by a limited number of companies because it is a convenient way to satisfy KYC, but it is by no means legally required to collect this biometric data, nor is it secure to verify customers this way thanks to the proliferation of AI.
KYC checks are already being tested with electronic IDs, and the identity of the customer is verified by the presence of a government ID, and the input of a PIN. No selfies or similar farces are involved.
Maybe you should quote the whole thing instead of making it sound like they sell the data?
"As part of a business transfer. Onfido may disclose your personal information to an actual or potential buyer, investor or partner (and its agents and advisers) in relation to any actual or proposed divestiture, merger, acquisition, joint venture, bankruptcy, dissolution, reorganization, or any other similar transaction or proceeding"
I agree with you but the thing is I don't remember doing any of that stuff to use privacy.com. I hope they just changed their policy and that I haven't forgotten about uploading identification and photos of myself. I normally would not tolerate that.
All I remember is using the plaid bank API which is itself probably very dangerous and a poor decision to allow.
Then why drop a steaming pile of shit on the company who's not directly at fault via the title? For clickbait?
I've used privacy.com for years. Never had an issue. Never had to validate my identity. Never had any issues with support. If used as prescribed (setting limits on cards etc) it fits in directly to where it belongs in my threat model.
Using a company and having proper contracts and agreements with them to be properly protected is not malice, especially since the company is well known and assumedly adheres to regulation.
I'm not sure what you want privacy.com to do differently.
I think the ask was pretty clear: not to share confidential identification information with sketchy companies that are clearly sharing that information with everyone.
So you're saying Privacy should reinvent the wheel with an incredibly difficult, terrible-to-manage process, itself requiring an entire company worth of people and a huge support staff, laden with insane amounts of red tape, just to perform a small function of their business, instead of contracting out another company that specializes in doing this exact thing?
This seems like a larger security/privacy surface area than the latter approach.
OP's original point is that a company marketing themselves as a privacy tool are forcing customers to use a 3rd party for processing very personal identification data. That 3rd parties TOS, which binds customers of privacy.com, says they can and will share data with anyone they want for any reason. That's nearly the antithesis of the privacy the company is marketing itself on.
Privacy.com don't have to use Onfido, there are other options out there. There could be a myriad of reasons why they chose Onfido over the competition but the TOS bind the privacy.com users and they don't offer any alternative.
For a company leaning on "privacy" as their primary marketing tool, this is a double standard. It doesn't mean Privacy.com is a bad company with horrible people building a terrible product. They're just calling out a company for doing something seemingly opposite to their marketing, and saying that's why they personally aren't using the product.
You can disagree with OP but doesn't make their point wrong, invalid, or stupid.
No, i didn't say that, nor did the post. You keep making these absurd leaps. Privacy.com advertises themselves as being private. I expect them to be private. They're the ones who chose to hinge 100% of their marketing strategy, all the way down to their name and domain, on how very private they were.
They should just verify identities without selfies, like most payment providers. This trend of using selfies comes from shady crypto companies that were eager to pretend that their users have been verified, while also benefiting from the collected biometric data.
The name is doublespeak and not concerned with privacy as an ideal, it's really just to manage CCs in a sane way, like using a CC once and then disposing of it so you don't get unexpected charges. Also it limits the blast radius if a vendor gets breached and your legal name is not exposed. (So you need to sacrifice your privacy to privacy.com to get privacy on other vendors). They need to rebrand as 'SaneCard' or something similar.
No, they don't. One of the main features is being able to put in any billing information you want and they'll accept it. Typically a bank will validate the name and sometimes the address against your account on file. Privacy ignores it.
Nope. You have to go through KYC with them, give them your address, last 4 of social, dob, and yes, I got stuck on identity check too. Just because it didn't happen to you, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You misread my comment. When I check out on a website using a card generated by Privacy.com, I can put any billing information into the checkout form on the site.
Huh, I've been using privacy.com and had no idea about this. Thanks! Keeping the blast radius of leaked billing info to privacy.com instead of a myriad of merchants sounds like a good deal.
This. You have to waive your privacy to privacy.com to get privacy on vendors/merchants. If I lived in the US I would happily waive it to privacy.com, since I buy stuff on e-commerce sites a lot. Enough times that I would be pissed if my personal info got leaked. Also being able to manage my card and lock it to specific vendors is sorely needed and should be a feature on all CC providers.
Yeah, my main use of Privacy.com has been with web payment portals that look old/unmaintained or otherwise untrustworthy (surprisingly common with state government sites).
If there’s a better option for this use case I’m all ears, though. Reading sibling comments that Privacy won’t actually stop charges past set limits is disconcerting.
>It's mostly about hiding the fact that the same person, you, are paying to merchant A and merchant B.
What merchants out there are cross-correlating credit card numbers to deanonymize people? Can you even do it in a way that's PCI compliant? If you're actually interested in preventing random merchants from tracking you, I think credit card numbers are the least of your worries. Your billing/shipping information, which is almost always collected is much more revealing about you and can't be anonymized. Given this I do think the name of "privacy".com is misleading. At best it's stopunauthorizedcharges.com.
That's not what it's about. It's the same reason why you use many passwords across all your sites. If one is breached, using privacy.com means your card information is not globally vulnerable to the point you have to get a new card, invalidate all your old ones, worry about personal information being correlated etc.
Back in the GPU scalping-craziness days of covid many online vendors limited purchases to 1 per household and that limit was enforced by full name, zip and billing address. With privacy you could generate one time use cards and use random names and fake apartment numbers in the billing address getting past the limit.
In defense of Privacy.com, they've helped prevent me from being defrauded multiple times. I use them any time I'm buying from a website where I don't trust they will keep my CC secure (like paying local utility bills).
Sure enough someone tried to use my one-time-use utility card multiple times. Once they charged it for 16 cents which how card runners test the cards to see if they are valid. Normally those won't show up on any alerts you may have, because most banks don't alert below $1.
But privacy.com does.
I actually prevented about 1000 stolen cards from being used because I was able to inform the local utility that their database had been breeched before they even knew about it, and they were able to let the CC companies know before the card runners could use them.
> Normally those won't show up on any alerts you may have, because most banks don't alert below $1.
My Chase credit card is set to text me on any charge over $0. I have received alerts for under a dollar.
Also, I have been using a credit card extensively for 20 years, and I don’t take many precautions (other than having text alerts for all purchases). I will put that number anywhere I want to buy something without even thinking about it.
I have had many fraud ATTEMPTS over the years, but I have never once lost money because of it. Having to change my credit card number has been annoying, but I am not sure it has been more annoying than it would be if I had to use a different number for every purchase.
I think that this is a totally valid approach. I merely prefer using privacy because it locks a card to a vendor and I can set limits (or simply pause a card) per vendor trivially.
In fact, this weekend I got a notice from wilsoncombat that their payment processor had been hacked and card info had been leaked, which I had suspected when I received a notification that a charge ($0.15) had been declined on the card I used with them in March. The charge was declined, and I was able to close that card and not have to redo my card info in every place I have a card linked.
Privacy.com is a great service. I use them all the time to generate 1 time use card numbers for sites & then cancel the card so they cannot mysteriously charge me. I've been with them for years & their CEO is a wonderful & smart person.
When you're allowing strangers to perform financial transactions - you're taking on risk that the money that is sent needs to actually be funded. They need to conform to KYC laws like all fintech providers - so yes, they will require knowing a little bit about you to operate in the United States like all financial institutions.
But they apparently require government photo ID that gets sent off into the cloud? You can most certainly get a regular credit card without that, so it doesn't seem analogous. They also intentionally hide this requirement so that you don't find out about it until after you've signed up, which is a pretty devious dark pattern.
That part is fine. The part that isn't is where they require you to give your personal information to a third party who has very weak controls on how they share it. Your endorsement makes me interested in trying the service, but I have the same "nope" reaction to the non-privacy as the author of this post.
What makes you think OnFido is sketchy? It’s a pretty popular platform for ID verification.
3rd party verification has become a standard in the fintech/insuretech industries since its very hard and risky to do KYC on your own. Also personally I don’t trust having all the random companies I transact with maintain my KYC info. At least in theory, the experts at ID verification have strong enough incentives, motivation and expertise to keep my data safe, reducing the attack surface area.
FWIW, they are at least willing to put this in their privacy policy:
> Whenever legally possible, we seek to protect the information we share by imposing contractual privacy and security safeguards on the recipient of the information. This is particularly important in cases where the recipient is located in a country that has different or lesser privacy laws than those of the country where the information was originally collected. In some cases, however, it’s not possible for us to do so — for example, when we have a legal obligation to disclose information to a government authority and that government authority isn’t willing to enter into such contractual safeguards.
Check the article. It has quotes from their ToS that can be roughly summarized as "we'll sell all your data to whoever pays and you have no control over this".
No, that's not what they are saying at all. The quote on the blog is misleading and leaves out important pieces. Here's the full thing:
"As part of a business transfer. Onfido may disclose your personal information to an actual or potential buyer, investor or partner (and its agents and advisers) in relation to any actual or proposed divestiture, merger, acquisition, joint venture, bankruptcy, dissolution, reorganization, or any other similar transaction or proceeding"
Nothing sketchy about Onfido. You're hating on them all over this thread based on nothing but one sentence from their privacy policy, quoted on a random blog. A sentence that's not even saying what you think it's saying.
Here's the full paragraph:
"As part of a business transfer. Onfido may disclose your personal information to an actual or potential buyer, investor or partner (and its agents and advisers) in relation to any actual or proposed divestiture, merger, acquisition, joint venture, bankruptcy, dissolution, reorganization, or any other similar transaction or proceeding"
The use of third party KYC services like Onfido is widespread in the cryptocurrency space as well, where over-compliance is the norm right now. Consumers are given little choice as to which provider stewards their ID scans, bank statements, biometric data, etc.
This user experience has trained the most vulnerable, non-tech-savvy audiences to provide just about anything requested when asked for ID verification. Including to phishers.
If you push back too hard against arbitrary, invasive KYC requests, you start down a path towards becoming unbanked.
The USA is badly in need of modern consumer privacy regulations.
Last I checked, privacy.com uses Plaid, too. When privacy.com had asked me to use Plaid to add a payment method, Plaid's privacy policy talked of gathering transaction information and using it for advertising among other things.
I think Plaid's stance was that if the host service (the one asking you to use Plaid) wanted to be invasive then it's up to them, or if this host would be upstanding and maintain your privacy, that could happen, too. It was up to the customer to check their policies. But this limitation was not spelled out nor promised that I could see.
I believe they've improved it now, but their login page literally used to say "Plaid" nowhere, and at least for my bank (Bank of America) looked almost identical to the official login.
> “Plaid will store your plaintext password and use it to periodically access your bank account.”
That's terrifying.
I'm looking into privacy.com as an alternative to using my real debit card number online because it gets stolen at least once a year. Having my bank account itself compromised does not sound like an improvement. Then again, how often do banks get hacked and have their credentials compromised? At least as often.
I believe plaid has oauth integration with the larger banks now. I remember using it with chase and chase showing me an auth and permission approval request screen.
because there are close to 20000 of them in the US, and while chase has the resources to do oauth properly, not every junky credit union can afford that
Few/no small credit unions (or banks) have their own bespoke online portal they developed just for them. They use a vendor. I bet a few vendors would cover a pretty large % of those 20K banks.
I don't know, what's in it for the big banks either? Probably the same thing as what's in it for smaller banks and their vendors? Apparently nothing, or not enough? Unless customers are going to use the feature to choose their bank? Or it saves the bank money from avoiding fraud? Maybe one or the other will be so eventually.
When it is, the vendors/platforms that "junky credit unions" use will add it, same thing as when big banks will add it. A vendor that small banks and credit unions use for their online platform probably has the same order of magnitude of aggregate consumer customers as a big bank has, I don't see why it wouldn't be about as do-able for one of those vendors as a big bank.
Phishing is typically tricking an individual into divulging sensitive information. Credential stealing is typical, but still a subset.
Plaid uses banking credentials on a user's behalf. Yes, it's similar to using stolen credentials because... it's the same thing, except consent, audits, insurance, etc. all play a role whereas with criminal activity they do not.
This seems to be some weird semantic angle where because Plaid is audited that makes what they're doing not phishing? I'm not sure I agree with that definition or that it is particularly common.
That said, if it makes you feel better, pretend my comment read "Plaid pretends to be the users' banks in order to trick users into giving Plaid their bank credentials and stores those credentials without their knowledge or consent".
That is the definition of phishing. This is why "vishing" is "voice phishing", etc. Phishing is stealing information. It's not a "semantic angle" - it's the definition of phishing. You're free to consulting a dictionary to fact check me.
Plaid is not phishing, by any true definition of the word.
Like I said, pretend I said "Plaid pretends to be the users' banks in order to trick users into giving Plaid their bank credentials and stores those credentials without their knowledge or consent" if it makes you feel any better.
I'm content with my comment if you agree Plaid's behavior matches phishing with the only exception being how they use the credentials afterwards.
But it's how they use the credentials afterwards that's core to the disagreement over your use of the word phishing. Which is to say, you don't like or trust them, fine, but Plaid isn't a scam that's going to try and steal your money with those credentials it's gotten. Which makes it not phishing. Phishing involves an attacker trying to get those credentials in order to steal yo shit. Plaid is trying to perform a service on your behalf.
If I go to a store and pick up some items and leave with them is that stealing? How about if I pay for them?
Like I said, pretend I said "Plaid pretends to be the users' banks in order to trick users into giving Plaid their bank credentials and stores those credentials without their knowledge or consent" if it makes you feel any better.
ahahahaha man who do you think is the one who added all this KYC shit and who scares companies into over compliance... and you want more regulation as a solution. we could start by removing all KYC requirements and fighting crime as crime instead of imputing some criminality to a financial transaction. like even if it's part of a criminal enterprise the transaction itself isn't the "wrong" part.
Umm. Removing KYC requirements just makes it easier to launder dirty money. Why would we do that? As it is the US is considered a safe-heaven for dirty money - google South Dakota trusts.
“Fighting crime as crime” is meaningless.
umm removing KYC requirements also allows people to transact privately. yes bad people can do bad things with freedom, news at 5. i'm aware of south dakota trusts and intend to use one in the next few years to protect my assets and operate privately.
fighting crime as crime isn't meaningless, it's how we're supposed to do things.
Lol no. Your desire to avoid taxes is not a “right”, it’s a criminal intent.
Oh, and newsflash - a SD trust is an absolute red flag, and will just mark you for “Enhanced Due Diligence”, where you will be asked to prove the source of funds. And chances are that info will be then shared with your local financial crimes agency - and without your knowledge. And if you think your lawyer or accountant don’t make those reports… heh.
Ahhh FFS, this post is complaining about third party KYC providers. Give me a break, in what world can you get a visa or mastercard without KYC? They provide privacy not anonymity, payment privacy that is not hiding your identity privacy. Your payments are private. Your payment info can't be easily tracked across the different cards you create. That's it.
The scenario is that a potential buyer audits random records to validate that checks are/were handled ok and the data that must be preserved for KYC audits actually is.
This isn’t “selling your data to potential bidders” (if they are bidders there is no sale presumably?) so not sure why you are reading into it such intent.
I agree that most of the comments here amount to handwringing (or not understanding what amount of "privacy" is legal), but also, what KYC is really necessary for a company like this? If I understand correctly, all they do is pass through transactions. They don't hold customer deposits or provide credit. Isn't all this third party verification a little much?
> what KYC is really necessary for a company like this? If I understand correctly, all they do is pass through transactions.
Products like this are particularly susceptible to fraud, especially given that they're charging your bank account directly. Without any KYC, if I as a fraudster get access to your bank login, I can basically drain your account. That opens up a ton of liability to Privacy. Also, the card networks tends to be pretty risk-averse with allowing issuing products access to their networks if there's a lot of fraud going through their services.
So, it's much easier to put KYC in place in order to avoid the headache of dealing with fraud/AML/etc
The point of KYC is to make money laundering harder (and other transactions that the various governments want to track/police). To that extent, yes, they need to be able to show a regulator who was making those transactions.
The actual funding source/bank behind them won't see any detail beyond "privacy.com".
Any card issuer (or virtual card issuer) has to do this.
My point is that privacy doesn't need to do KYC because there is no possibility of the customer evading regulators. Assuming that privacy answers subpoenas, they would be able to give the government detailed transaction info and a bank account which would identify the customer. KYC at this level of abstraction doesn't seem to solve any kind of legal problem. I'm glad to be educated by an expert, though.
Edit: A sibling explains a good liability reason for this, which makes sense but would not imply any legal reason.
Which is why KYC is required. Two small deposits just means you have access to someone's bank account, not that you're actually them. Money launderers will pay mules to use their bank account to move money around.
Privacy is backed by an actual credit card ever since they restructured things to get around most sites rejecting their cards due to mistaking them for prepaid.
That's what the post is complaining about, but the problem is quite deeper. The KYC bit is actually ok IMO -- you're giving your identity to places that likely already have it.
What this kind of article should be about is the same thing that VPN is about. privacy.com actually removes privacy. Now, instead of VISA being the only aggregator of your purchase data, privacy.com is also. Either way, the merchant and VISA know your purchase history. Now, so does "privacy".com.
If you want to hide something from your bill so that someone else in your household doesn't see it, then ok. If you want to hide your address and name from a merchant (say for a digital downlaod) then ok. If you actually want more privacy, privacy.com is the opposite of what you want.
Rachel here, I lead Operations at Privacy.com. Wanted to clarify our data collection and retention process, and our position on privacy.
Our goal is to make sure that customer data spends as little time as possible with third-party providers like Onfido. Onfido’s general policy is that they will not save customer data longer than a year but they set up different contractual agreements based on what customers stipulate. We've stipulated that they delete data after 30 days.
The "Privacy" in our name is about making sure our customers’ personal and payment information is kept private from merchants and from fraudsters.
We offer a financial service that comes with legal and regulatory requirements and we have to gather details like address, social security number, and phone number to authenticate a user’s account. If you know of other KYC providers that have more privacy-forward policies, we’re open to exploring.
Happy to discuss more. You can drop me a note at rachel@lithic.com.
Privacy.com is great. I've been using it for years on the free plan. I use short-lived, vendor-specific cards a few times per month.
The author is complaining about the service's name not matching their expectation of what the service is supposed to do. I don't think that's fair. The Privacy.com homepage summarizes the service very well in my opinion. You give Privacy.com your financial information so you don't have to give it to a dozen other companies, and you get to control when and how those companies use that information by setting limits on spending or card duration.
The author was expecting this to be a cryptocurrency tumbler or what?
Sooner or later we're going to need a federal dept of is-this-guy-who-he-says-he-is. No startup can solve this; it's not profitable enough to do right. The last resort for authentication will always be "go to a place and talk to a human" and the gov't is the only entity who is willing/able to staff a brick-and-mortar office in reach of everyone in the country.
I know some people are afraid of the feds having a centralized and accurate registry of citizens, but the alternative (that every company who takes payments must have their own separate, partial, and inaccurate registry) causes a lot of problems.
It's definitely a problem in the US. When setting up an account with treasury.gov there's a good chance you'll have to verify your identity, and the only way to do that is to go to a bank that you do business with that has a "Medallion Guarantee." I wish we could get to the point of having government issued smart cards for verifying identity. I would be elated if my US passport also functioned as a smart card.
If you think about it, there is a way this is done already in the real world - using Notaries. Notaries verify your ‘documents’. Not that’s they are experts at sensitive data storage, but there could be something to learn from the ‘distributed’ system of notaries.
Notaries already exist. The proof that they are not a good solution to this problem is that they're not currently being used to solve it. All the companies doing hokey things like asking people to take a picture of themselves holding their ID and so forth could just start asking them to find a notary instead. AFAIK none of them do and I'm not clear on why you're thinking they would or should.
You are right - current notary system may not be optimal for this use case. What I meant to say was that in my understanding, my main issue with 3rd parties such as OnFido etc is my lack in trusting them with my information and secondly storing that info in a central repository. If a bad entity gets access to that database, they now have very detailed information about me.
I would rather prefer a decentralized & secure way that can be accesses via an API by companies such as privacy.com etc. The distributed piece is solved by Notaries. Could we learn something from how the notary system works that can be leveraged to build out a modern distributed ID verification system.
This is what Notaries are for. Maybe we could find a way to more efficiently utilize their services instead of creating yet another federal agency to intrude on our lives?
You've misunderstood the problem we're trying to solve.
Right now, N companies have N partial records of my identity, with varying ages and accuracy levels. Company A has my name and phone number, company B has my email and name and my previous phone number, company C has a copy of my driver's license from two years ago, etc. N partially accurate versions of my identity, floating around, getting bought and sold and merged together with buggy perl scripts, forever. Notaries do nothing to solve this.
Whence comes this fear? How would the government having an accurate list of the citizenry, and storing a key for you so you can attest your identity, intrude on your life? Doesn't having to scan a copy of your ID and send it to your [bank/insurer/crypto account/hosting company/employer/etc] intrude on your life more?
Other countries do this and manage (Australia, NZ, UK, etc). Companies outsource the KYC to vendors who carry ISO27001 etc and heaps of insurance. No sane IT people would want photos of so much personally sensitive data on their own systems.
The tech to do this well is nearly here - combination of ID on Apple/google wallet + decent on-device facial recognition tech and you can hugely reduce the risk profile of KYC.
They have saved me from fraud 2x in 3 years. Then I simply closed that "card" with the click of a button. No need to call my bank, cancel my debit card that I use at ATMs, and wait a week for a new card
I don't have to worry about remembering to cancel free subscriptions. I set the card max at $1. This has saved me multiple times from the free trial scams that you need to opt out of. Free trials should be opt in after the trial. Opt out is a scam to trickle money into a company from non customers.
They stopped a contractor from charging me over $2k when I specifically told them they needed to tell me how much before charging me. Of course they didnt tell me and tried to run the charge. Privacy put a stop to their BS.
It is mostly automatic or easy to set up once you are using Privacy. Some banks have started to offer similar digital card numbers similar to Privacy.
Companies using Onfido [0], Stripe Identity[1] or other similar services, just want to move the "trust/fraud" problem one layer away without throwing internal resources at it.
It is a hard problem, and using a 3rd party service is more cost effective than staffing a department to do manual verification.
I worked in domain registrations in the early 2000s and it's funny how we used to put stock into what sort of TLD a domain used. Like .com would clearly be a commercial entity, while .org would be more non-profits, open source, public domain and stuff like that.
Anyways, they're probably harvesting your payments and selling that info. I've noticed that since the card issuers have such high security requirements, and audits, a lot of little businesses have cropped up who are trying to act as middlemen to your payments. Because they just found a backdoor to getting all your payment history without hacking your card issuer. I believe privacy.com is one such business.
That might be true if they weren't also the card issuer[0]. The main way they make money is on interchange, which for a card issuer is a kickback of up to 2% from Visa/Mastercard/etc [1].
So privacy.com themselves handle the transaction from their own account then? I stand corrected. I assumed that you registered your card with them and they just acted as an inbetween.
You "believe" without any evidence? To the contrary my bank card purchases were resulting in targeted ads but privacy.com cards have not shown any sign of that after using them for over a year.
Yes I believed to be more specific, you've changed that belief with your facts. Thanks.
But I still do believe this practice goes on here in Sweden where small businesses are offering services that act as man in the middle between the consumer and the card issuer. And therefore they're able to harvest your transaction data, which is gold.
I absolutely love Privacy.com for the service they provide. It's fantastic to be able to create a one time use card for a web purchase. I even have one connected to my Walmart app that allows me to pay in store via the QR code.
If you just want to generate 1-time credit card numbers to use once it's the best experience imo - can easily do it in the Wallet app.
Also lots of these subscription websites now detect card generated from something like a Privacy.com is prepaid and will prevent you from using it which defeats the purpose. Not the case with Apple.
> If you just want to generate 1-time credit card numbers to use once it's the best experience imo - can easily do it in the Wallet app.
I'm sorry, but how? To best of my awareness, there is only one virtual card (though it has a rotating CVV) and the only option I see is "request new card number" that should be used in event of having the current number compromised. I don't see any way to have multiple virtual cards there.
Well, technically there are 3+ cards - the physical card (without a CVV, so not really useful), the virtual card (see above), and one-per-device Apple Pay cards numbers (probably not useful unless merchant accepts Apple Pay).
No it’s just the ability to generate new credit card numbers on demand
If you want various virtual cards with varying limits I also noticed my Citi card allows me to do this. It’s just a little clunkier but it’s actually more robust than Apple’s feature if you wanted a unique number per website.
They actually don't let me use my primary email as they specifically don't allow accounts to use a Yandex email. They said the reasoning was to prevent non-US citizens from creating accounts, and that I would have to use another email address...
It would have been funnier if they used privacy.org.
I never expected them to provide any privacy of any sort, but I don’t think they could make matters worse. Privacy.com has been extremely convenient for me, private or otherwise.
Then why do they have all those incredibly questionable things in their privacy policy? What makes them "trustworthy"? I've never heard of them, but from reading this blog post it seems like yet another evil company trying to suck up PII from unsuspecting victims and sell it.
And that's why you shouldn't trust a random blog. They completely misrepresented that paragraph. Here's the full quote:
"As part of a business transfer. Onfido may disclose your personal information to an actual or potential buyer, investor or partner (and its agents and advisers) in relation to any actual or proposed divestiture, merger, acquisition, joint venture, bankruptcy, dissolution, reorganization, or any other similar transaction or proceeding"
Omitting the context very clearly makes it sound like they sell your personal information, when the paragraph is actually referring to disclosing the data in an M&A transaction. The "buyer" here is not a buyer of data but the buyer of the company. Even you said "from reading this blog post it seems like yet another evil company trying to suck up PII from unsuspecting victims and sell it".
It actually wasn't that particular line that made me think they were selling personal information, it was mostly the other three points in that list which you seem to be ignoring:
* Each of Onfido’s and/or Provider’s third-party vendors may have access to the facial scan data
* Onfido is in no way linked to or responsible for the practices of other Providers. Onfido encourages you to read Company’s privacy policies and terms and conditions, as well as those of other Providers, which may apply to the use of facial scan data extracted from photos and videos.
* Onfido may disclose your personal information... or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary... to protect your vital interests or those of any other person
And I replied to "how is that different from what the blogpost said?", not the other points but you got me curious so here goes:
* "Each of Onfido’s and/or Provider’s third-party vendors may have access to the facial scan data"
This is actually "Each of Onfido’s and/or Provider’s third-party vendors may have access to the facial scan data to store the data, to maintain backup copies, and to service the systems on which such data is stored.".
Completely standard and another misrepresentation by the blog trying to paint it like they send the stuff everywhere when it's just about their storage and backup solution.
* "Onfido is in no way linked to or responsible for the practices of other Providers. Onfido encourages you to read Company’s privacy policies and terms and conditions, as well as those of other Providers, which may apply to the use of facial scan data extracted from photos and videos."
Nothing strange whatsoever. Again completely standard in GDPR that you need to have to to acquit yourself.
* Onfido may disclose your personal information... or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary... to protect your vital interests or those of any other person
This is actually "To comply with laws. Onfido may disclose your personal information to any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, or (iii) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person; and"
Wow, probably the worst misrepresentation. This blog is straight-up misinformation and slander. Thanks for highlighting it.
Lets break this abysmal post down into what appears to be the point:
Privacy.com flagged you for some unknown reason and asked you to verify your identity. You learned that Onfido exists and googled the name and (LOL) decided you would spend 45s on Wikipedia and then read a privacy policy written not-for-you, and then post yourself on HN so you can "inform others."
Lets not even bother with the fact that flagging for further identification happens at every financial company that exists. People are flagged all the time for a number of reasons dictated by ML/AI that is not always right. "I've never had this happen before." That's not how math works.
As I am not a lawyer, I probably missed some more bits as well.
We can tell. And you did. You missed the part where you have to read and comprehend more than three or four words at a time. That or you intentionally excluded the pieces that invalidated everything that got you to the front page of HN. I'd wager it's the former. Allow me to do the research you pretended to do:
First and foremost, there are regulations on how PCI/PII data can be stored. I'll assume you read about reading about or pretended to read about PCI so I won't go into the details you don't care to understand (but should).
Each of Onfido’s and/or Provider’s third-party vendors may have access to the facial scan data
When a company hosts with providers like AWS, GCP, etc, those are considered "third party." If you curl the onfido website you can see that it's hosted on S3 (or at least parts of it are). It's very likely that onfido is storing data in S3 which means a third party has access to store the data, make backups, etc. You also excluded THE IMPORTANT PART on previous line that said Onfido securely stores all selfies, videos, photos of identity documents, and facial scan data in an encrypted format.
Onfido may disclose your personal information to an actual or potential buyer (note "potential")
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you've never owned a company who's had an offer to exit. When company A purchases company B they first have to evaluate that business and decide if they want to buy it. Since you think like Twitter I'll clear something up for you: acquisitions don't happen by posting on twitter "I want to buy Twitter." This is a standard bullet point in every privacy policy. When you are approached by a potential buyer you sign a slew of NDA's and other legally binding documentation that prevents any party from sharing the details of the agreement.
Believe it or not, startups don't have enough time, money, energy, resources to rewrite every little feature required to run a business. Visa and Mastercard also have their own ways of sharing your private information. Does that also mean to start a privacy focused fintech company you need to write the entire american payment system?
Onfido may disclose your personal information... or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary... to protect your vital interests or those of any other person
Jesus Christ. I don't even know how you pieced that together so I'll _actually quote_ the document:
To comply with laws. Onfido may disclose your personal information to any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, or (iii) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person;
This is American and guess what: you have to comply with the law. I know in your fantasy world of impotence masquerading as activism you think you can "privacy" your way around it, but guess what? You can't. Any company operating in <insert country> has to comply with the laws. "I use Proton and they are privacy." I'm sure you do, and they're privacy because the laws permit it until they don't.
So what do you do? You try to deprive a company who's actively trying to do what you pretend to do with your useless tantrum.
1) I have three different major credit cards and none of them have this feature. Your comment is still true in the abstract though, so I hope the amex product team is reading.
2) For a knowledgeable consumer, there is huge incentive to use services like this to prevent the credit companies from being a single point of financial data aggregation. But—and here I guess I'm talking to amex again—if disposable or per-merchant card numbers are widely offered by card providers, I'd expect most people would just use those instead of a more robust provider like privacy.com.
Really? Visa/MasterCard/Amex have Click To Pay but it's on the merchant to offer it. This is the opposite of Privacy.com where the customer can choose to use it.
It's mostly about hiding the fact that the same person, you, are paying to merchant A and merchant B. It allows you to easily have a card per merchant, and lock it to the merchant so that when its number is stolen, it can't be used anywhere else.
The domain name is a bit lofty, yes.