Is privacy.com convenient enough to use for everything? It does seem curative for credit card fraud

As I recall, it was David Pakman who mentioned privacy.com as a practical shield against fraud and maybe identity theft when shopping online.

Here’s a video

   

And here’s a writeup on how it’s supposed to work.  You create pseudo-cards with each vendor and pay from a bank account, but you give up rewards.

Mozila Firefox and Google Chrome have new tools to check your email addresses for breaches, and the results are pretty shocking.

Clifford Colby has an article in CNET on how to check the dark web for your logon passwords after a data breach, link. 

  

I tried this with Mozilla Firefox Monitor and found seven violations.  The most glaring was “People Data Labs”   There was a breach of over 600 million accounts (potentially) in October 2019. This seems to be a generalized data broker company selling to advertisers.  Here’s another supporting story.

I’m a little concerned about Verifications.io in March 2019 because that happened when I was trying to get a digital wallet to work. There is very little value involved, however.  Here’s a story from the ITRC. Over 700 million violations.  This seems to be a pattern. 

I also have them from Ticketfly (2018), MySpace (2016), Linkedin (2016), and Adobe (2013).

I have very little on Myspace and haven’t looked at it for years. I look at Linked In occasionally.

The pattern of these breaches suggests mostly Russian, Chinese or former republic origins (maybe North Korean) for the hacks.

 These could explain some robocalls (which increased in 2018), some spam (that looks very silly). 

You would wonder if data breaches could complicate the enforcement of (and even liability problems for creators) associated with COPPA, and maybe CCPA, as third party plugins or cookies might be feeding these companies.  

    

There have also been emails claiming I purchased Apple products in Indonesia. Kazakhstan and Belarus, and no bill for them ever showed up.  Of course I haven’t been to these places.  Programmers don't have good legitimate jobs in these countries. 

  

Google Chrome offers a similar tool but it appears your devices need to be synced first.

  

In 2013, a pickpocket robbery on the DC Metro resulted in about $27000 attempted smart card fraud before the systems stopped it.  Metro had to eat this one. The perp was arrested later on another crime.