My understanding is that the mentality is "they paid us, we have their data, we're keeping it for future leads, we could get a new line of revenue by turning that into a product."

I don't know much about privacy.com because it's not available outside the US. Knowing a bit about the legal side of payments I doubt they can promise anonymity though. They're just not passing my identity on to merchants as I understand it.

I doubt that there will ever be a widespread, convenient way to make anonymous electronic payments. The authorities would never allow that to happen (for understandable reasons I have to say).

Incentives are not working at all. Lots of services I pay for go to great lengths to squeeze even more out of that customer relationship. And how could I possibly trust a large number of small companies I know very little about?

I assume the meaning is that if you pay a site, they know exactly who you are; not just a cookie ID, but an actual credit card transaction with a real name attached.

If you pay for a service there's every incentive to mine your data - you proved you have the money by paying for a service, thus your data is much more valuable comparing to Joe Schmuck who doesn't pay.