Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Prepaid cards (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 weeks ago by FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Have you tried them for privacy purposes? What are your experiences?

Here is mine. I've used the Visa prepaid cards. Where I live (USA) you can buy them "anonymously". Scare quotes because sure, nothing is 100% anonymous now. But you can buy them with cash and activate them without giving a phone #. Not quite as anonymous as cash, but close. It avoids the heavy data trail of a normal CC. And you can use them sometimes where you can't use cash.

But there's the prob. It's hit and miss if they work. Unfortunately, these are HUGE among scammers, so those scammer fucks poisoned the well. Some stores will flat out deny them. Other times, they work fine.

I've had probs at some point of sale terminals, others work OK. Ditto gas pumps. Seems to be no way to know which way it'll go without trying. Which means you gotta have another way to pay lined up.

I haven't tried them for online shopping yet.

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[–] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think it might depend. When I complained, they implied they do it for some ppl, and not others. And they won't tell you why you triggered it.

My guess, just a guess, is if somebody is too much off-radar already, then you trigger a risk score since there's not a massive data trail in the big data brokers. Once you hit a threshold, they demand more info from you.

IDK how much or little it happens tho.

[–] f3nyx@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

it might be because you were trying to access via VPN. if you have a residential IP to exit from or you can go to a library or something to try and sign up from there, I bet this wouldn't trigger.