Privacy.com Review

Privacy.com allows you to create single-use virtual debit cards for online transactions. This works perfectly for anyone who doesn’t want untrustworthy websites to have their debit card information. Privacy offers free and paid plans.

I’ve used Privacy for more than a year and want to share my experience with this virtual card creation service.

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Privacy.com Features

Features you’ll find in Privacy’s free and premium versions include:

• Single-use virtual cards
• Spending tracker
• Set an account spend limit
• Browser add-on

I’ll cover the details for the paid plans in the “Pricing and Plans” section.

1. Single-use or Disguised Cards

You can create 12, 36, or 60 single-use or permanent virtual cards per month. The number of Privacy cards you can produce depends on the pricing tier you’re subscribed to.

Before you can use these cards, you’ll have to add a funding source. I’ll cover the steps to add one later.

Here’s how it works.

You create a virtual card. You’ll get regular debit card information like:

• Card number
• Card Verification Code (CVC)
• Expiration date

When making purchases on other sites, you’ll enter the virtual card’s information. And when it comes to using your name, you can use whatever name and address you want.

Once the purchase proceeds, the online store will pull money from your Privacy.com account.

Then Privacy will pull money from your funding source.

In my experience, many websites will consider a Privacy card as a prepaid card. So you may want to look up whether the place you want to shop accepts prepaid cards.

Here are some examples of stores I’ve been successful with Privacy:

• Amazon
• Google Play
• Apple App Store

You’re likely wondering how Privacy virtual cards will appear on bank statements. That depends on different factors like:

• Debit card funding source:
  • PayWithPrivacy* (merchant’s billing descriptor)
  • Or PWP* (merchant’s billing descriptor)
• Checking account funding source: (merchant’s billing descriptor) PRIVACYCOM

That’s with the Privacy Personal (free) plan. With Pro, you can change the merchant’s billing descriptor to what you want. But it’ll still say “PRIVACYCOM.”

I’ll explain why when covering the Privacy Pro features.

2. Per-card Spending Tracker and Spending Limit

Each virtual card you create has separate transaction pages to simplify bookkeeping. You can also set spending limits for each card (from $0 to unlimited).

You can set spending limits in the following increments:

• Per transaction
• Per month
• Total amount your card can spend
• Per year

See the image below as an example:

For instance, if you pay for a one-month’s subscription of World of Warcraft, and don’t Blizzard to ‘accidentally’ take more money from your account, set a limit. To account for taxes, you’d want to set an $18 monthly limit.

Many of you may not know what game and company I’m talking about. But they’ve made their web interface easy enough for a 6-year-old to understand.

Unfortunately:

You can only adjust the dollar amounts with your spending limit by increments of $5 (e.g., $5, $15, or $4,500).

3. Account Spending Limit: More Like a Restriction

Whether you’re a paid or free subscriber, you’ll have a 24-hour account-wide spending limit of $1,250. And a 30-day limit of $5,000 [1].

You can increase your spending limits if you fall under certain criteria:

• Subscriptions to recurring transactions
• At least 1–2 months of consistent spending
• Continually maxing your daily and monthly limits: this shows Privacy that you’ll need a bigger limit

If you sign up for the Teams plan (their highest-paid tier), you can request spending limits.

And if you’ve had your Privacy.com account long enough, you could email them at [email protected] and politely ask if you can get an account-wide spending limit increase.

I wouldn’t use Privacy for expensive monthly purchases. Unless they increase the account-wide spending limit to meet your needs.

Privacy.com Browser Addon and Extension

The Pay by Privacy.com browser extension and mobile apps enables you to create Privacy burner cards by clicking two buttons.

You can get this extension for the following browsers and mobile operating systems:

• Chromium Browsers (e.g., Brave)
• Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Android
• iOS

Instead of switching tabs while you’re on your merchant cart page, you just need to click the plugin icon and click “New Card.”

Afterward, enter your nickname and spending limit.

And finally, shop.

You can manage all your burner cards with this plugin. Just ensure you’re logged into your Privacy account.

If you’re the type of person who usually runs multiple screens in your setup, I recommend skipping the plugin, despite my praise.

Privacy Pricing & Plans

Here are the current plans Privacy.com offers:

Tier	Price *	Card Creation Limit	Cashback
Personal	Free	12 per month	No
Pro	$10/mo.	36 per month	Yes
Teams	$25/mo.	60 per month	Yes

* These prices don’t include potential fees or taxes.

I’ve covered Privacy Personal.

The following sections will focus on the company’s paid tiers. I’ll cover the price, features included, and whether it’s worth getting.

Privacy Pro

Privacy Pro costs $10 per month and adds features like:

• Cash back on purchases
• Hidden transaction information
• Allows you to create up to 36 virtual cards
• Priority customer support
• Everything Privacy Personal includes

The following sections will cover these features in-depth.

Cashback

You can receive 1% cashback as Privacy Credits on any transaction you use a Privacy card with. And you can get a max of $4,500 cash back per month.

Privacy will convert the cash back you earned into Privacy Credits every month around the 10th of the following month. Once you have your credits, you can spend them on almost any Privacy card purchase.

You can’t spend Privacy Credits on the following vendors and categories:

• International websites
• Particular clothing brands like YeezySupply, Footlocker, Nike, and Adidas
• Money transfers

These credits work like free money. And refunds work like any other refund with your Privacy card.

Discreet Merchant: “Hide” Transaction Information

The Discreet Merchant feature will mask a merchant’s name on your bank statement. It’s a great feature for those who have shared bank accounts and want to buy a surprise gift for your partner.

Without Discreet Merchants transactions will appear on bank statements as Privacy.com [EmbarrassingShirt.com].

With the feature, you can choose from a list of options to mask the merchant’s name. Here’s an example: Privacy.com NSA Gift Shop.

The burner debit card service can’t discard “Privacy.com” in the bank statements due to compliance regulations.

Thus, I don’t recommend upgrading to remove “Privacy.com” from your statements.

Priority Support

If you don’t want delayed support, you’ll need to pay. However, I’ve never noticed a difference in the response time from their customer service. The last request I had took way less than 12 hours to receive a response.

Better response than many websites I’ve experienced.

Privacy Teams

Privacy Teams costs $25 per month and offers the following features:

• Everything Pro provides
• Dedicated account manager
• Create up to 60 Privacy cards
• * Export your account
• * Support for multiple users

* It says on their blog that this feature is “Coming soon.” But that was in 2019. And I haven’t seen any updates [2].

This plan only makes it so you can create more cards and gives you a dedicated account manager. If you need 60 cards at the same time, then I’d recommend using Teams.

Otherwise, stick with Personal or Pro.

How Privacy.com Secures Your Data

Privacy is Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliant. That means Privacy.com Lithic and their virtual cards met a checklist containing 12 items.

The PCI-DSS compliance requirements checklist includes:

Use of firewalls	Proper password protections	Encrypt all cardholder data
Encrypt transferred data	Uses anti-malware software	Continually updates firewalls and anti-virus software
Only “need to know” staff can access personal data	Unique IDs to access personal data	cardholder data kept in very secure physical location
Create a data access log	Continually scan and test for vulnerabilities	Document when and who accesses files

Most of these are vague, but here are some details Lithic Privacy provides a bit more details on their website:

• Send all traffic through a Transport Layer Security (TLS): hackers can’t ‘listen in’ on transmitted data between you and Privacy
• Password protection with PBKDF2 with 100k iterations: reduces brute force attacks because attackers will find difficulty guessing your password
• Data center protected with Internet Protocol Security (IPsec): they use AES-256 encryption (some of the best encryption around)
• One time password (OTP) account login security: makes it difficult for people to enter your account

You must enable OTP yourself. I’ll cover this later when I cover getting started with Privacy burner cards. I wish they had hardware security key integration. So if a miracle happens and someone from Lithic reads this post, please consider adding it.

In short, it’s secure.

Getting Refunds With Privacy Cards

I had no problems getting a refund on a shopping website, having used Privacy.com as my payment method. I only had to initiate the refund with the vendor like normal.

A day later, the money went back to my Privacy funding source, not as a Privacy Credit.

Currency Conversion With Privacy Cards

Privacy may convert a foreign currency to USD on a different day. So the actual conversion rate may differ. But they won’t charge you currency conversion fees.

Privacy.com Alternatives

Here are some ‘alternatives’ to Privacy virtual cards:

Service	Transaction Fee (Per Purchase)
Privacy	None
PayPal	None (for buyers)
Stripe Issuing	0.2% + $0.20 (domestic)1% + $0.30 (international)
Capital One Eno	None

The following sections will cover websites and services kind of like Privacy burner cards. I’ll cover each services’ details, pros and cons, and whether they’re worth using.

That way, you can choose the right software.

Privacy.com vs. PayPal

Privacy burner cards offer a bit more flexibility since you’re creating virtual cards, instead of having to log into PayPal.

Many websites I’ve used don’t allow me to log into PayPal. But your shopping habits aren’t the same as mine, so you may run into more support.

PayPal also doesn’t allow you to create self-destructing debit cards. Privacy does.

Regarding customer service, PayPal has some of the worst and most unhelpful customer service I’ve experienced. Once in a while, I do encounter friendly and helpful team members.

Privacy.com definitely has the upper-hand in this area.

And Privacy virtual cards do a better job with not having account-wide glitches with two-factor authentication. When enabling 2FA on PayPal, it has a weird ‘glitch’ and doesn’t let me log into my account at all.

So I’d have to call PayPal and wait 30 minutes to talk to someone in an attempt to log into my account.

Both companies will require personal data. Because they must adhere to banking laws. But at least with Privacy, you can use a different billing name and address with various eCommerce businesses.

PayPal wins in sending money, though. But that’s irrelevant. Because both businesses technically have different purposes.

Stripe Issuing: Best for Business Owners

Stripe Issuing allows you to create both physical and virtual cards for your business. After creating these cards, you have full control of their distribution and management.

You can set spending limits on each card and choose whether you want to use them once or multiple times. Stripe also allows companies to create branded physical cards.

That’s not likely a feature you’re after. But I felt obliged to mention it.

Unlike Privacy’s subscription model, you’ll pay whenever you generate a physical or virtual card.

You will also need to pay transaction and international transaction fees.

They charge a 0.2% + $0.20 fee per domestic transaction. Stripe also charges 1% + $0.30 per international transaction.

Capital One Eno: Best for Capital One Account Holders

You’ll only find this feature useful if you have a Capital One account. Their Eno tool allows you to generate and manage anonymous virtual card numbers for your account.

What sets Eno apart from Privacy is the price. You don’t have to pay for Capital One Eno.

How to Apply for Privacy.com

You can only apply for a Lithic Privacy.com account if you’re a United States citizen. To verify your identity, they’ll ask for the following information:

• Full name
• Birthday
• Last four digits of your social security number
• Phone number
• Email
• Debit card
• US bank account information: they don’t allow international banks

Fill out the application and wait 24 hours.

You should receive an email detailing whether your account was approved.

If they declined you, contact their customer service. They responded to my inquiries within 12 hours. But your experience may differ.

Upon creating an account, immediately enable two-factor authentication.

Navigate through these account settings to enable it:

Dropdown menu with your name > Account > Toggle on ‘Two Factor Authentication’

While you’re here, you can also see your account spending limit, integrations, and notifications settings. Familiarize yourself with these settings.

Anyway:

For two-factor authentication applications, I recommend Yubico Authenticator (if you have a YubiKey security key). Or the Aegis Authenticator mobile app.

I don’t recommend Google Authenticator or Authy. Aegis offers more security options and has better account exporting features.

Regarding Privacy virtual card service’s data privacy.

Californian citizens have the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) on their side. So if that’s where you live, you can contact Privacy and ask them to delete your information. Ensure you mention you’re a resident of California.

After they verify your account.

Residents in other states can attempt to do the same. But you may not have as successful of results. Pay attention to your state’s data laws to see whether they add a similar act.

How To Create a Virtual Card on Privacy.com

Follow the process below, and you’ll quickly protect your debit cards from potential hackers:

1. Click “New Card.”

2. Set your nickname and select a picture to identify your card.

3. Set your monthly spending.

4. Create your card.

Afterward, you have access to various features to control your card.

For example, you can pause your card, which means that if any merchant tries to pull money, you’ll end up with a declined transaction.

Or, you can add a tag to your card to make it easier to find.

You can customize the card’s appearance or loan the card to someone in need.

FAQs

Privacy.com has some areas on their website where they’re vague.

I aggregated some frequently asked questions that should help you better understand the virtual card company before creating an account.

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