Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

privacy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 367 posts

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#51

Post by mindslight »

The_Magistrate wrote: post #40
sp332 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to remember that just cancelling a payment method doesn't necessarily mean you're unsubscribed. If you're still getting a service, you're still on the hook for paying for it one way or another.

If this is true, then Privacy.com doesn't resolve this obligation. The temporary card number won't be chargeable by the merchant, but you'd still be on the hook for the renewed (and unpaid) service.

It certainly changes the burden of notification. A company can setup many hoops for canceling, forcing you to go through some asinine phone tree and drone script to stop charges to your card. Whereas lacking an established payment channel, they can no longer play dumb if you eg send them a simple email to cancel.

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#52

Post by tedmiston »

__d wrote: post #10

I understand why you need it, and I want this service in a big way, but I'm just baulking at giving you my online banking username and password. Why should I trust you with that?

There's a startup building an API layer for banks that would make this better. The name has slipped my mind right now, but perhaps someone will know. IIRC it is about replacing ACH entirely.

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#53

Post by boling11 »

jeddawson wrote: post #44
boling11 wrote: post #4

Hey HN - Privacy.com co-founder here. I'm really excited to share what we've been working on for the past year and a half or so. We've been neck-deep in payments stuff on the card issuing side (getting a BIN sponsor, ACH origination, etc), so happy to answer any questions on that front as well. P.S. For new users, your first $5 donation to watsi.org is on us :)

Are you planning anything for B2B? I’m working on an idea that will need to pay hundreds of vendors for the services they perform for our customers. We want to pay the vendors electronically where possible so having unique card numbers for each vendor would be a great thing. After looking at Privacy.com I want to take it a step further by generating a unique card number for each of our customers. We’d need higher spe…

This sounds like it would be an interesting use of our API. Can you ping me at bo@privacy.com? I'd love to chat more.

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#54

Post by jasode »

dsl wrote: post #48
jasode wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ran into issues of being flagged as prepaid or single use cards I generate Citi's virtual credit card numbers every month for numerous online shopping payments and I haven't run into issues. It seems that it's not possible to determine if a card is a virtual number by parsing the digits.[1] Do you have other information stating that merchants know how to reject virtual cc numbers? [1]"As there is no way for a mercha…

Citi and BOA get away with it because they can allocate out of a large pool of BIN numbers that are otherwise regular use debit/credit cards. These guys will have to figure out how to get a similar "mix" to avoid being flagged as prepaid/single use. This was the issue that ultimately caused PayPal to kill the service they had that was almost exactly the same as Privacy.com.

> will have to figure out how to get a similar "mix" to avoid being flagged as prepaid/single use. This was the issue that ultimately caused PayPal to kill the service

That's fascinating. Perhaps PayPal killed it for multiple reasons because the (possibly biased) answer from a PayPal said not enough people were using it: "The one-time card numbers -- technically they were MasterCard virtual debit card numbers -- were discontinued as a public user-facing feature because they were not generating sufficient transaction volume and revenue to warrant further development."

[1]https://www.quora.com/Why-did-PayPal-discontinue-their-one-t...

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#55

Post by supster »

tedmiston wrote: post #52
__d wrote: post #10

I understand why you need it, and I want this service in a big way, but I'm just baulking at giving you my online banking username and password. Why should I trust you with that?

There's a startup building an API layer for banks that would make this better. The name has slipped my mind right now, but perhaps someone will know. IIRC it is about replacing ACH entirely.

https://plaid.com/

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#57

Post by tedmiston »

mtgx wrote: post #3

> STEP TWO When you check out on any website, the Privacy icon will appear in the card form. Click it to create a new card, and auto-fill the card form. Use any name and billing address you like. > STEP THREE After the card is charged, we withdraw the money from your chosen funding account, similar to a debit card. Not sure I get this. Do you have to fund an account on Privacy.com? So it's like a Paypal where you gen…

To me they were implying "no one employee can decrypt your data". I agree it's worth being explicit.

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#58

Post by barnaclejive »

Raphmedia wrote: post #18
__d wrote: post #10

I understand why you need it, and I want this service in a big way, but I'm just baulking at giving you my online banking username and password. Why should I trust you with that?

We already trust mint.com with this information. I don't see the big issue.

Services like Mint, Personal Capital, MoneyWiz, etc don't directly store or use your banking login, they pay to go through secure, well-known services like Yodlee http://www.yodlee.com

Is privacy.com actually asking for bank logins, or just your bank account number/routing? In either case, it is nothing new or uniquely scary about this service. If you're not comfortable with this, then there really aren't any third-party online banking apps you are going to be comfortable with anyway.

Re: Privacy – Forget Your Credit Card

#59

Post by avuserow »

adrr wrote: post #29
cordite wrote: post #5

The stop subscriptions aspect really stood out to me, I had to spend 40 minutes on the phone with that darn company to get things canceled, even though I only used it for one day for an hour.

If you signed up online, the company must provide a way to cancel online per visa rules. Check their TOS, they probably list a way to cancel online via email or whatever.

Got a citation on this? I'd love for it to be true, since it'll save me a lot of effort. But WSJ, for instance, requires you to cancel via phone even if you sign up online.
Post reply on HN