Anonymous CC: Does “Entropay” really not hand my personal data over to a company - are there alternatives?
"Do you guys know any options that are accessible to any global citizen? Prepaid and stored value cards are anonymous. For an arbitrary reason, the really anonymous ones only allow you to load $500 but there is no regulation that dictates this amount. In the USA, these cards are exempt from being declared at border crossings. Not because they look like credit cards, but because they are exempt by the US Treasury and Customs. The cons is that there are generally fees to use them. US DOJ has done research showing that some groups take advantage of the exemption moving upwards of $50,000 a day between borders, but Congress is fine with this exemption and the burden is always on the government to determine ""illicit origin"". Stigmatizing how money is moved is only a 30 year old phenomenon, but many free nations do not really have capital controls, they only care that you pay taxes and that the integrity of their stock markets are upheld. Aside from that there are no qualms about anonymity, except from your neighbors but they dont matter for a global citizen. In theory, the UK should have more flexibility in anonymity options, such as stored value cards with higher limits."
I think the answer to this must differ from country to country.  I have lived in several countries where the normal everyday way of making a payment is to instruct my bank to transfer the money to the recipient's account.  Of course this means I must know his name, SC and account number – but this is an accepted part of the system; businesses routinely display that information on invoices and correspondence.  It is simply not regarded as confidential. DumbCoder's comment suggests that if he has that information he can take money from my account without my permission – in other words, my bank will pay money out of my account on someone else's request, without my authority.  Is this correct?  In which country or countries can this happen?   (I must go there quickly and begin stealing people's money.) "&gt; The main issue is that anonymous payment is strongly opposed by banking and governments.  The US government [prints nearly half a trillion dollars](http://www.moneyfactory.gov/uscurrency/annualproductionfigures.html) of anonymous money *a year* for use by the public, and banks spend untold billions maintaining a network of machines to dispense it at the time and place of your choosing. In what way is that ""strong opposition?""" I've had a card cloned 15 years ago and used to buy over 5k of goods in another country. So the inconvenience of having a card closed and re-issued is quite annoying even though the charges were reversed and I was made whole. But these days most CC fraud isn't from a card scanned by a waiter and cloned then used elsewhere. Mostly it is poorly secured databases or point of sale terminal malware. The latter is getting curtailed by chipped cards and the largest source of fraud is now online transactions (so called card not present) where the merchant has your CC number. If their system is breached the bad guys have a wealth of card numbers they sell in an E-bay like site on the dark web. This is where the Citi virtual CC comes in handy. Here's how it works to protect the bank and the hassles you go through when a card as to be re-issued. Citi's virtual CCs let you generate an actual credit card, complete with security code and expiration date. What is unique is that once the virtual CC is used it can only be used subsequently by that same merchant and is declined by any other. You can also set a total limit on what the merchant can charge as well as an expiration date. I use them for all my online accounts because they are, for all practical purposes, immune to the malware that steals CC info. Even if somehow the virtual CC is used before the merchant makes the initial charge that locks in the CC to their account the charge can be reversed without closing your actual card which has a different number. You can manage multiple Citi virtual CCs and view charge status, close, or adjust limits over time so managing them is quite easy with no risk to your primary account. It's awful. Avoid it at all costs, because [they have proven to be insecure.](http://www.zdnet.com/article/000webhost-hacked-13-million-customers-exposed/)   They were saving passwords in plain text for crying out loud. If a company with millions of customers doesn't even take the step of safely storing customer data, I wouldn't trust them with anything regardless of what they promised after the breach. It's an infosec rule at my 200 person software company that really doesn't have much of a security risk (i.e. no one would gain much by getting into our records). If it wasn't a rule at equifax, at least on paper, I'll eat my hat or a dictionary or something.  To be clear, I'm not claiming I know this, I'm just basing it on experience working in smaller tech companies. And let's put it this way... the failings of big companies are very rarely a *lack* of rules and bureaucracy. There's no way the reader encrypts the data before it gets to the phone.  If any of the phones have a backdoor (increasingly more common), the remote attacker can just sit back and soak up credit card numbers.  Bad, bad idea. "It's anonymous/automated. They don't know who you are, just that customer x1a bought y. If your name isnt given to employees ""your"" privacy isnt being volated because the dont know its ""you.""  I imagine the government justifies their intrusions on our digital privacy the same way." There are rules and regulations as to how the credit card information must be stored, and I assume Square adhere to these rules. The point is that the barber doesn't need to see your credit card at all, and doesn't have to keep its number for keeping tabs, you only share the information with Square and they remit payments to everyone else. This is very similar to Paypal, Amazon and Google checkout systems, except that Square combine it with physical card processing. "&gt;You could say the same about any public utility. (except the one largest one, technically)  There are literally thousands and thousands of processors, which is not the case with utilities. Additionally, processors don't need to have any kind of office or presence anywhere near the business they're serving, which means being able to choose without geographical restrictions. Also, PayPal is not a utility. This is not a relevant comparison.  &gt;Are you saying they are unable, both contractually and technically, to affect the consumer side?  They'd have to revoke their partnerships with banks who issue cards, which they aren't going to do, because consumers using cards is how they make money. Banks could choose not to issue cards, but they're already free to do that. (There's no right to a credit card.)  &gt;But also by selectively quoting me you are (deliberately?) side-stepping what actually happened in the WikiLeaks case, to focus on the consumer side.  Visa and Mastercard prohibited payments to Wikileaks on the basis of WL allegedly facilitating illegal activity. How is that relevant to what PayPal's doing?   &gt;You must buy things in different corners of the Internet than I do. The customer experience (to me) is that there is ""the store"" or you can pay with PayPal. Yes, ""the store"" is actually a payment processor but this is a quick slippery slope to ""what? You can just set up your own payment processor once they've all blocked your legal business"".  What are you talking about? You acknowledge that the store has its own processing but somehow that's not enough because someday they might not have processing and have to go through PayPal?  Processors *already* deny service to legal businesses. Notably, anything considered ""high risk"" - which includes travel services, pharmaceuticals, firearms, adult entertainment, telemarketing, debt collection, tobacco, and more - but also for businesses with poor credit, high chargebacks, business practices they don't agree with, lots of international transactions, etc.   It literally happens all the time. And, there are so many processors (tens of thousands) that there's another processor willing to step in.   Tons of websites don't even use PayPal anymore, and the ones that do often layer it on top of a different payment option. (PayPal is trying hard to increase their presence in stores because of the competition in the internet space.) No one is unable to accept payments if they're barred from PayPal. PayPal actually cuts off accounts all the time because people use it for things against PayPal's TOS.   Amazon payments, Shopify, and Stripe are the ones that most people know off the tops of their heads for online processing, but there are literally thousands. No one is somehow unable to conduct business if they can't use PayPal.   The only time that businesses can't really get processing is if they do something like rack up chargebacks and disappear or commit fraud against a processor. In those cases, the processor can put that business on the Terminated Merchant File (or MATCH list) and other processors will see that there's been a problem with that customer and not take them on. Even in those cases, businesses can rectify the issue and get off the MATCH list or they can look for processors that will serve them anyway and expect to pay a premium for it." They could if they wanted. It's of course illegal to do if you didn't authorize it, and to process credit cards, they need to have a relationship with a credit card processing company, which is not so easy to fake - not any Joe could do that using a fake ID. Note that you are protected through your credit card company; if you tell them it's an unauthorized charge, they'll return it to you without discussion. It is then the vendor's duty to prove that it was authorized, and if he cannot, he'll pay extra fees to the processing company. Overall, the risk is very small; it shouldn't be your worry. Believe it or not, what they're asking you is not as unusual as you might think.  Our company sells a tremendous amount of expensive merchandise over the Internet, and whenever there's something odd or suspicious about the transaction, we may ask the customer to provide a picture of the card simply to prove they have physical possession of it.  This is more reassurance to us (to the extent that's possible) that the customer isn't using a stolen card number to order stuff.   It doesn't help too much, but if the charge is disputed, at least we have something to show we made reasonable efforts to verify the ownership of the card.   I think it's pretty thin, but that's what my employer does. What you are thinking about is bitcoin probably where people are and can be anonymous. I would suggest you to look that up. Why would you want the company who failed to be the one monitoring your credit?   Bankrupt them and be done with them. They're likely going to be sued into insolvency and that in turn should create an about-face to the other credit companies.    The last thing anyone should want is giving additional or further responsibility to a company with the largest personal information leak of all time. The model itself is fairly common for serving particular niche markets. A few other organizations which operate in similar setups: prepaid card providers such as NetSpend, GreenDot, AccountNow, etc; startups such as SmartyPig, PerkStreet, WePay, and HigherOne. Still, nobody else seems to be providing full-service online banking to mainstream customers the way we plan to.  We plan to have much better security than most banks, which isn't hard given the current sorry state of online banking in the US. And having an intermediary who's looking out for your interests can be a good thing. David, my co-founder Josh lays out our launch plans and why we are invite-only in his latest post. In short, we made a decision to build our own call center rather than outsource it, and that limits how quickly we can bring people on. "In addition to the ""The Time Machine""-type society you're talking about where the working class basically end up devolving into hunting game for elites, i'd worry that the enhancement for the skilled-labor jobs you describe would include some dog collars. If I'm an enhanced engineer I'll start my own company, not make money for someone else. If I'm a super soldier I'd hit up academi (blackwater), not get treated like shit in the army. If these technologies can enhance intelligence, it can probably also steer traits like loyalty, ambition, etc to ensure that the person acts more like an appliance rather than a genius."