For many, this month is when gift-giving season officially begins in the United States (and several other places, I presume) thanks to Black Friday, which is quickly consuming most of November in many cases. As a result, even though online shopping is something most of us engage in year-round, now it’s particularly important to discuss how to safely shop online. Below is my now-annual updated online shopping tips, reflecting techniques and strategies I’ve picked up in the last year.
I’m by no means a privacy expert by I don’t see much upside to using the “privacy.com” referral thing referenced.
Privacy.com allows you to create virtual cards, allowing you to set up rules for how money can be used through them. It also masks the receipt details that your bank would normal get access to so they can’t sell that data about what you purchased.
I didn’t know credit card/banks sell your info… That sounds absurd
Edit:
How does Privacy make money? Privacy, like other card companies, collects transaction fees called interchange from merchants. We don’t, and will never, sell our customers’ data.
So there is no downside or cost to a customer using it there no subscription to use it that’s what I thought it was.
if action = "Online shopping" then if paymentMethod = "crypto" then result = "Safe" else result = "Unsafe"
privacy is when there’s a permanent public log of all your transactions
I think it’s the other way around, mister/miss.
Unless you use Monero, it’s not private nor safe.
Well there’s more to it. For example, you can’t create an account with your real name on the shopping website and then pay with Monero. You need good opsec. Though 99.9% of online shopping providers don’t accept crypto in the first place.
While I do use crypto for digital purchases, for physical ones I would much rather pay cash. I either shop in-person or order delivery to the online store’s physical office where cash can be paid, which is usually the only delivery method without extra cost anyway. Our big Amazon-like marketplaces only accept prepayment, but pretty much all others with a physical office accept payment on delivery.