I coded a credit card payment a few times in my career and from what I saw it's always just a token. That token could be only used to make transactions from your account to the specific vendor's account. Of course there's always could be some incompetent developer who thought that saving credit card data into a database is a great idea, but overall it's not as risky as people think.

I would (and sometimes do) pay more money to not give money to Amazon. Also, I feel like the vast majority of sites support Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal and/or Venmo these days so I rarely find myself entering my credit card number.

There was this feature provided by banks. I remember BofA was one. Unfortunately they removed it. You could create a temporary credit card number for specific vendor.

It even had option to set one time limit or recurring limit.

I don't understand why it was taken away, was it giving too much control to the customer?

Google offers virtual credit card numbers fyi. I don’t think they are vendor locked, but offer a potential solution for you. Albeit one with additional drawbacks.

I use Revolut alone for that reason. Single-use virtual cards they call it.

Capital one Eno browser extension for chrome generates a new CC number for any site. I love using it!

Isn't this basically what Shopify is, nowadays? Or "buy with Amazon" or a few other options that I can't remember the names of.

It is. I've even found myself searching within the shop app to find products from smaller stores vs the larger stores. It's nice they have a shipment tracker built in and so far i've not had any issues. They're even running promotions / incentives with their Shop Cash, so they're trying for sure.

Many sites support Paypal which means your payment data is safe

I really wish there was an open standard for something like this.

There is. https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

Supported everywhere except Firefox (where there's currently a flag to enable). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...

privacy dot com does this really well

Many countries have solved this without needing monopolies/monopsonies by having sane payment methods.

I don't know why people get paranoid about this, in the US and most Western countries payment processing has minimum security requirements and you have blanket protection from fraud by credit card companies anyway. All of this means in practice consumers are very safe putting credit card details on websites. The websites that don't have the skill to meet minimum security requirements find a payment processor, so a hacker wouldn't get it from website, they'd have to get it from a processor like Stripe or Paypal.