Seeking consumer privacy focused paypal alternative in the US, prefer FOSS if possible. Any suggestions?
Seeking consumer privacy focused paypal alternative in the US, prefer FOSS if possible. Any suggestions?
I'd bet you can guess why
Cash or Crypto is about all I can think of..
If your looking to move money from a bank to someone else's bank, I don't think you can expect to have much privacy in that from the parties actually making the transfer happen?
I'm more looking to keep legal transaction data private in the sense of not being shared or sold. If that's even possible ever-the-more.
Best option I can think of is privacy.com
You can create virtual cards linked to your bank account and the transaction data is masked when processed by you bank. All my bank transactions show up as NSA Gift Shop. My bank doesn't know where I'm spending my money. Yes you have to trust privacy.com...
There is no privacy-focused PayPal alternative in the US, in part because US money transfer laws and policies (e.g. Know Your Customer) directly oppose privacy.
However, there are a couple of new projects that might eventually lead to something less bad for privacy than PayPal is:
- GNU Taler, if they ever get any exchanges, and they either figure out how to mitigate the high fees for wire transfers or use some other settlement method when people on different exchanges make small payments. (Their plan to use batch wire transfers won't help until the exchanges get a lot of adoption and frequent use. Of course, high fees discourage adoption and use, so this might not ever happen.)
- FedNow, if banks ever use it to offer appealing person-to-person payment services instead of just using it for themselves and their business customers.
Taler looks like a cool project.
Thanks for the input
Monero?
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/advanced/payments/
Monero is the only privacy digital cash equivalent I'm aware of. There are a limited number of vendors who will accept it, and any of your friends who you can convince to take monero will also accept it
Here's a list of known services that accept it. Things like VPNs, web hosting, email hosting, game hosting, internet services basically
Any of the other payment systems, the bank systems like zelle, PayPal, etc ... They all have the problem of introducing a third party into your transactions. Who will then almost certainly sell your data
Thanks for those links.
They all have the problem of introducing a third party into your transactions. Who will then almost certainly sell your data
Shoulda held on to cash harder....
If money is involved there's most likely KYC so... no?
And that's okay. Just looking to break with the enshitification movement.
I'd bet you can guess why
If your use case is illegal and requires anonymity, digital money transactions are dangerous due to the US law requirements, even if the system is FOSS. Use cash or cryptocurrency with good opsec in such cases.