With all these good recommendations on this thread, I have decided to create a privacy.com account for my family. I have given privacy.com our address, my cell phone number, my email, and our bank information (they require the actual username and the password). All very vanilla, US, SF Bay Area, never had any problems with any other financial websites.

Not enough! My account activation is incomplete until I link my privacy.com account to my Facebook account!!! I thought this is so funny in the context of this privacy/Facebook spying thread.

Quote from my privacy.com account page: "Sometimes, the information provided at signup isn’t enough to verify someone’s identity, and activate their Privacy account. Connecting your Facebook account is a quick and easy way to provide extra identity verification. Okay"

P.S. I am now feeling uneasy about the whole thing. I have changed my bank login password and I am trying to cancel/delete the privacy.com account -- but there is no such option in the website menus.

Isn't privacy.com US only?

According to their website you need either a US checking account or debit card, so for all intents and purposes, yes.

If you're in (certain parts of) Europe, Revolut will offer you one-time use virtual debit cards if you're on one of their paid plans. However, I have no personal experience with them. Being limited to one transaction each makes them a lot less interesting in my opinion, since I can't set up my subscriptions through different cards.

You can have a virtual CC ( or more but didnt check ) with Revolut that can be one time use or multiple, its all up to you for how long You want to use it.

I recently looked into them. You can have up to 5 on their premium plan. But these are still "normal" debit cards with no limits beyond the funding of your account.

The service that privacy.com offers is different in that it allows you to control very precisely what kind of charges are allowed on any of your virtual cards (and allows you to have more than five). If I used a particular card only for Spotify, I could put a $10/month limit on it, for example. This is more akin to the one-time card offering, but it's not quite the same since it doesn't support recurring payments.

On that note: if anyone is aware of a service like privacy.com available to users in mainland Europe, I'd be very interested to hear about it.

AMEX is what provides that solution, and fine the merchant as a bonus. It's called disputing a charge. Other cards have the option too, but AMEX will fight for you the most. I've literally had merchants issue a partial refund, disputed the original charge, and ended up with bonus money, multiple times.

There is a cost to using credit cards. One of the main reasons to use them is this protection against bad actors, and punishment of those actors by fines.

Reversing the charges doesn’t work with Facebook because they will block your account and for most people that’s not an option. And Americans Express is not going to fine Facebook or suspend their merchant account. That’s for small merchants.

Why do people put their cards on Facebook then? It is absolutely not safe to do, especially if you have (young) children.

I doubt even a company like Facebook is very big by credit card processing standards. Visa and Mastercard constantly run a huge amount of money through their systems. If your fraud rate goes above a certain level they give you a warning. If it stays too high they'll cut you off.

Yeah, a company that stored your credit card number and charged it w/o your permission - don't want to get blocked by someone like that. Definitely never an option for most people.

>I've literally had merchants issue a partial refund, disputed the original charge, and ended up with bonus money

...why is this ethical?

As an European who rarely sees credit cards, I always wonder if this is USA only? How do you dispute a charge?

My web banking platform has options for almost everything, but not much credit card related. Do I contact my bank, or do I go straight to VISA?

You should usually contact your bank and dispute one of the charges on your bank statement (that's how it seems to work in the UK, at least.)

You can dispute CC charges in Europe as well. All of my cards specify that I should do this as soon as possible, but no later than one year after the charge.

I have never needed a chargeback, but I had a peek at MasterCard's policy just now and it looks like you need to contact the issuing bank. I would assume it works the same for other four-party schemes such as Visa.

I click dispute in my online statement, check a couple of checkboxes to verify type of transaction, and write 1 line of why. Takes 30 seconds. Visa is not good for this, so I never use a Visa.