Is there something similar to privacy.com in Europe so I don’t have to enter my credit card information everywhere? Or another way to buy stuff online privately on many different stores and websites?
Not really the same thing, but Revolut has disposable virtual cards that you can use (but it’s a full-fledged bank).
Some apps like MBWay in Portugal also allow you to create these virtual cards, but it requires a Portuguese bank account.
Most online places are now aware of Revolut’s disposable CC numbers and reject them. They haven’t worked for at least a year now. They’re basically useless.
Edit: I should clarify: all CC payments nowadays use tokenization. The website doesn’t get the CC details, they get a token issued by your bank. The token can be one-time use, or recurrent. Naturally, for one-time cards Revolut issues one-time tokens. The problem is that many websites have caught up to it and require indefinitely-valid, recurrent tokens for any payment. I don’t think this is something that Revolut can solve on their side.
What a bummer, I used the disposable CCs with revolution a decade ago and was thinking of going back to it…no point if they’re not usable anymore.though.
What I use for such sites is a frozen card which I only unfreeze after setting a limit for my exact purchase amount. Pay, freeze again for the next time.
My bank will assign cards to specific accounts and only draw payments with that card from that account. And they let you make multiple cards and multiple accounts, naturally.
So for me the easy solution is to simply not keep money in that account (because it’s a debit account and will simply refuse payments when there’s no money).
The other simple solution is the fact that the bank also lists the tokens currently associated with each card, and lets you remove them. Once the token is gone the website has to ask for explicit permission again.
For those not familiar, nowadays websites can no longer store actual CC details (it’s a huge compliance violation) and in fact they never even get to see the CC details anymore. You enter the CC details on the processor’s page (which is a separate entity), they send them to your bank, the bank verifies them, asks for a 2FA confirmation from you, and if everything checks out they issue a token to the website.
The token can be good for a one time payment, or for recurring payments. If it’s a recurring token my bank will list it next to the card involved and let me revoke it. The website can use the token for as long as it’s still listed – if I delete it they have to ask for a new one.
I suspect that this is the main shortcoming of Revolut’s one-time cards, they issue one-time tokens (naturally) and it’s easy for the website to see that it’s not a recurring one.
Edit: I should also mention that in the EU this token mechanism is NOT used for utilities. For utilities (and for other EU recurring payments) there’s a similar but explicitly separate mechanism called SEPA. It’s similar in the sense you can set up the payments and you see them listed next to your account, you can revoke them at any time, they also use a tokenization system, but they draw directly from an account, there’s no CC involved and no CC processors, it’s a system that works directly between EU banks.
While the disposable cards might not always work, you can always create a regular virtual card and delete/freeze it afterwards. Not sure if there are any limits tho
You can also delete the payment token that was issued to that website.
My bank lists the currently valid recurrent tokens explicitly next to each card, and lets me revoke them individually (but I can also re-add a card to the merchant if I want to).
In the Revolut app it’s a bit wierder, you have to go to a card, tap on a past payment, and then you get a “block future payments” button that prevents that merchant from ever using that card, but there’s also a “subscription payment” toggle that only revokes the recurrent token for that particular payment.
The “block future payments” feature is severely limited on the free Revolut accounts, you can only do 3 blocks per month and can only have 5 total overall active. So you probably want to turn off the subscription toggle instead.
I’m not familiar with any service that works at the international level, but over in Portugal, the biggest ATM network, Multibanco, has had a service called MB NET (now integrated with the newer MB WAY app), which allows you to create temporary cards with 3 different behaviours: one-time, monthly, multiple uses. The first one always has 1 month of validity, while the others only expire after a year, and you can define a maximum capacity.
It works perfectly well in foreign online services, but you have to have a card from one of the associated banks (presumably from their Portuguese branch?).
You could buy more from places that support Bitcoin lightning or Monero, which gives you a lot more privacy. You can buy gift cards online with those currencies and then spend those gift cards at major online retailers.
Do people in europe use credit cards? I remember hearing it wasn’t popular as much as the US. Isn’t debit more common?
It mostly depends where. French use it for almost anything, even more since COVID. On the other hand, Germans have a tradition to prefer cash.
I think bank transfers are more popular in Northern Europe. I only use a credit card if I want additional buyer protection / insurance from my bank.
I’m from northern Europe, and I have never heard of or met anyone that preferred bank transfers ever. If I can’t pay online with credit/debit card, I’m not buying from there, but it’s extremely rare to find somewhere that does bank transfers for B2C at all IME.
With bank transfers I am referring to services like Paytrail/Klarna where you authenticate with your bank, and choose which account the sum is taken from.
Services like Klarna are micro-loans though. They’re not a bank transfer or really a direct payment of the service/product you’re buying, it is literally just a small loan with a short runtime (usually 3-12 months)
Klarna offers direct payments too. In Sweden you can pay with Swish, credit/debit card, or bank transfers.
Fair enough, they only offer the micro loans where i live.
Isn’t Klarna a credit service more like a loan where you then distribute the payments over the next few months? You sign a contract and stuff just like bank loans, it’s not the same as making a bank transfer at all.
You don’t have to use the loan feature Klarna offers.
You can also pay with a credit or debit card using Klarna (makes makes it more convenient if you haven’t memorized the CC numbers yet) or using bank transfers, or with services like Swish.
Never have I ever heard about anyone preferring a bank transfer in Northern Europe.
I’m from there, and I can’t remember which year I used cash. It’s either card or digital payment like MobilePay.
We use them to pay online, of course. But the payment mechanism is different because most of the time they’re debit accounts not credit.
Depends where you go. My Czech bank card is a debit card with a number on it that you can use like a credit card. Dutch banks don’t have this and we use different online payment methods. I never really needed a credit card for anything (until I traveled in France) so the price to have one is not worth it.
Here you get a debit card by default with your bank account, and that one’s free. You might get a credit one, but credit limits are typically low. I lived in Canada for 9 years and by the time I left I had a CC with a limit of 26k CAD. Here my Spanish credit card has a limit of 1.2k euros, and I’ve had it for quite a long time.
In Spain at least there’s quite a lot of confusion with this. People call any card type a “credit card”, even debit ones.
No. It’s not as popular. In Germany most have a giro-card, but credit cards are becoming more popular. Many still prefer cash though.
In Germany most have a girl-card
I assume autocorrect screwed you?
For anyone else reading this: no, there is no such thing as girl-cards.
Yes thanks. I meant giro-card.
In Sweden we almost exclusively use Credit/debit cards cash is extremely rare and a lot of shops don’t accept cash.
It has been this way for many years.
Can’t use cash online, (nearly*) anywhere.
- Mullvad is the only service I know that accepts payment through mailed cash.
not thats its private, but the virtual cards from wise are nice. can be frozen and sometimes you can change the billing addeess and “save” taxes.
I believe it is not possible to have it due to EU regulations, or at least there aren’t any proper ones right now. You can read some discussions about this on Privacy Guides’s discourse, like this one for example: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/card-masking-tool/15342
I think the TLDR is: use your own bank’s card, as you will always end up with a card which is tied to your identity, so better give that info to as few bank institutions as possible, you gain no advantage by signing up with someone new. On the other hand, if you need to convert and the fees are atrocious, then you could look into Revolut and others like that, but that doesn’t really help your privacy, no matter how many virtual cards you make, since they’re all in your name anyways
Not sure if it helps, but Capital One has digital cards you can create on the fly.
My wife has tried using those and they’ve never worked a single time.
In Spain at least I have two small alternatives to this:
- Paypal (I don’t like it too much, but it works fine).
- A prepaid credit card offered through my bank. Good for sites that don’t look too trustworthy but I need to buy from. I just activate it, load it with whatever amount I need, I make the transaction, then disable it again. Even if it gets leaked no one can take any money out.
For everything else I have a virtual credit card number that’s not dynamic, but at least it’s something I use exclusively for online stuff.
