privacy.com would be really attractive to me, but it comes with a mandatory arbitration agreement, and I'm trying to limit the number of businesses I interact with that rely on one.

Certainly the combination of mandatory arbitration and "we have your banking info" is a no go for me. If you want access to my bank account, you need to have some liability.

At some point I'm probably going to need to bite the bullet and sign up for an actual bank account or credit card with someone who offers it under normal terms -- but even that's been kind of frustrating to find. Capital One requires a browser extension. A bunch of places require phone apps.

I just want a banking site that lets me go to a webpage and click a "generate" button.

I am pretty sure Bank of America has this. I use their generated cards for several subscriptions.

This sort of error, where they accidentally pull thousands of dollars out of your checking account, can happen with privacy.com because you give them access to your bank account to use it.

Mastercard has a service like this also, but I seem to recall that last time I tried it, it required to have Flash installed, so I didn't use it.

Yes it’s neat, but also involves giving privacy.com unfettered pull access to an account. Not to mention the data pipeline for profiling your use. Not a bad trade if it suits you, but things to be aware of, certainly.

Credit cards already have legal protections so worst case you can file a charge back and your money is safe. Etsy has access to bank accounts which don't even have the credit card protections.

Apparently Citi offers virtual credit cards to their users, I've been meaning to open an account for this feature alone.

Are there any fees associated with that privacy.com service?

None in my use of the service.

To my knowledge, they make money because they act like a credit card (they collect cc fee from the seller), but actually just proxy the charge to your bank account. You basically lose out on any your own cc rewards though since you can't proxy to another cc (then they would lose their profit margin paying your cc provider).

Personal example of when I found it useful: I used a burner card from them to buy a board game online, turns out the site was hacked, leaked the card info, additional charges were attempted but failed because the burner card settings only allowed the original charge through. Was really glad I didn't use my own cc.

Unfortunately if one must supply privacy.com with access to a bank account, it's not an improvement over Etsy in terms of exposure. And with Etsy you can directly supply a credit card, leaving your bank account isolated.

I use privacy.com with a completely separate bank account account with a limited amount of funds. I think that it works well enough.

I use separate bank accounts for various isolation purposes, but they generally have a monthly fee when below a substantial balance. Direct deposit accounts are the exception in my experience, and one doesn't generally have multiple direct deposit employment sources.

If I need to setup a separate account to isolate privacy.com's use, why wouldn't I just make it a Citi account and use their virtual cards instead of providing all my identifying information to yet another third party open to hacking and diminishing of corporate values?

Because I don't use a browser that supports flash.

Capital One also does but apparently it requires you install a browser extension that you give permission to spy on all webpages.

Are you sure that's not just an optional convenience thing?