"virtual credit cards are actually a great interim solution that give you back some more control over your finances"

 

Credit cards are a notoriously insecure means of payment. 

Credit card fraud remains the most common type of identity theft in the United States.

About 11 billion dollars worth of losses due to credit card fraud.  The vast majority of that is online.

It's just a piece of plastic with a number on it and anyone who knows that number can make a charge to your account.

As we go about doing our business online we tend to give away our credit card information to so many different companies and that really spreads our risk across a lot of different places instead of just our bank.  --Josh Summers

Josh Summers teaches people about security products in the digital age.

It makes me a little and easy whenever I am handing out my information to all these different places.  --Summers

And we do it anyway because we like the convenience.  But there are a bunch of companies that offer things called virtual credit cards that allow you the convenience of credit cards well giving you more privacy and control of your purchases, like 

Premium, PRIVACY, Capital One, and Wise.  They work kind of like a VPN shielding your payment information from merchants.

1:05 I'm not giving out my actual banking information.  I'm not giving out my actual credit card or debit card number. I'm masking it with one that gives me a little more control.  --Summers

1:18. Increased privacy is a big reason why someone might want to use a virtual credit card.  Maybe you don't want your payment information to be a way that marketers can Target you or perhaps you just don't want to reveal your home address to people you don't know.

1:32. Not only are we masking that credit card number, we also have the ability to mask our address, our zip code, and our name if we wanted to.  You can use any name, any address, any zip code, and they will Auto approve that charge.  --Summers

1:46. I decided to give this a go and used privacy.com to purchase an online dance class with a fake name and a fake address it was a virtual product so there's no reason I should have to give them my home address and second it said in their terms and conditions that they were allowed to sell my data to 3rd parties.  No thank you.  The purchase worked a treat: one less company harvesting my data!  But the virtual card company itself is still collecting your data.  The great thing about Privacy.com, the service I used, is they promise never to sell user data in any capacity, and a lot of these virtual credit card companies have similar policies.  Another reason you might use a virtual credit card is a layer of insulation from the world of online fraud,

"How could someone get a hold of your credit card number?"  -- Joey Tribbiani from Friends 

2:31. We've become so inoculated to using our credit card that now we almost trust anybody with it.

2:36. But if this number falls into the wrong hands, 

2:39. . . . they will take you for everything you have without any compassion whatsoever.

You're basically saying when you have this number you have the ability to pull money from my account and yet we freely hand that number out to almost anyone.  Virtual credit cards allow you to put all kinds of parameters in place that stop those people from pulling money from your account without your permission.

2:58. I can say that this is a one-time use card. I can pause or cancel those cards at any time once I use that card once with a merchant it gets locked to that merchant. -- Summers

3:09. For example you might create a virtual card to pay your Netflix subscription.  

3:13. That card is locked to my Netflix account and it cannot be used anywhere else.  Not only that, but my liability is limited to $9 per month because that's what I've set it at.  Netflix cannot charge any more than that.  Or perhaps, it's just a one-off payment.  I had some yard work done on a house of mine the contractor basically asked me, "Can you please just email us your credit card information?" and when I sent my information I made it a single-use credit card and for a specific amount for the invoice.  So once they hit the card for that amount, the card was closed 2 minutes later.  Add after they charged that $800, anything else that they want to charge on top of that will also get declined.  

3:52. Even if someone gets access to the email and the card number it will be useless to them but it's not just sending credit card numbers over insecure methods like email that should concern us it's how the company stores that information once they have it.

4:06. We are giving all this information to companies that we may or may not be really confident about their security measures . . .  Summers

4:14. the small businesses your local pizza chain or your dentist that are also collecting your payment data you know they don't have necessarily these big it departments to make sure that their infrastructure is secure. --  Julie Conroy, Research Director, Aite Group's Fraud AML Practice

4:26. Instead of spreading our risk across a lot of different companies getting our credit card information all those were kind of trusting one company

4:33. Privacy.com, for example, takes great pains to store your data safely using things like password hashes, split key encryption for sensitive information, and isolating data.  Most of these companies have similar practices, but again make sure you read the fine print before you sign up.  A third reason why you might want to use a virtual credit card is that it's the best way I've found to eliminate auto-renewals for stuff you don't want anymore or forget about.  A lot of these services depend on you just forgetting that you have a subscription somewhere until you find it on your bill and you're like, "Oh, I better cancel that," by which time you've already paid for another month that you're not going to use.

5:11. Subscription services are notoriously hard to cancel they do this on purpose.

"I want to quit the gym," Chandler Bing.

STAFF:  "You do realize you won't have access to our full service Swedish Spa."

I WANT TO QUIT THE GYM, Chandler.   

I pressed the cancel button, and a little pop-up said, "We're sorry that you are interested in canceling.  You'll have to email this email address in order to continue," and I'm like that is not a cancel.  So what I did is that I went in and I canceled their card, so when they run that charge and find out that it's declined they will stop their services quicker than it would take me to actually do the cancel service.

5:45.  Some caveats about these virtual cards:  let's go back first let's go back to the VPN analogy the same way that a VPN hides your IP from websites you visit but the VPN company has access to everything you visit a virtual credit card hides your sensitive information from Merchants but the company sees everything you do keeping mind that this is not an anonymous service now just because the virtual credit card company knows what you're doing it doesn't mean your bank needs to some virtual credit cards let you choose from a selection of fake Merchant names and how you want your charge to show up on your on your bank statement.

6:22. And they've got a list of like four or five, it's like H&H Hardware, like some random names that you can put on so you can hide it from your bank.

A couple more caveats that I'll mention.  A lot of people like credit cards because they get cash back rewards.  You miss out on those rewards if you're using a virtual credit card.  But some would argue that it's a small price to pay to save you from the inevitable headache of credit card fraud. 

6:49. The other caveat is that I personally think crypto provides better protection in privacy and you get the added bonus of saving money on each purchase if you're using services like Dash Direct or Bitrefill or Purse.io. but recurring payments still I think the crypto doesn't do well at all so virtual credit cards are actually a great interim solution that give you back some more control over your finances.  All in all, the less data you give to the least amount of places online, the smaller your digital footprint and the more control you have over your privacy.  Virtual credit cards are really cool product that I recommend people check out.

7:25  Being able to mask my information kind of add in that anonymous or pseudonymous layer between my actual information and who I'm giving it to me it just gives me a little more confidence as I move forward with my number, my address, and my credit card, whatever.

Find Josh Summers' YouTube channel here. 

This is a radical decay in biomedical ethics

Please share 🚨 https://t.co/bwT0ELKvWj

— Kelly DNP🩺 Functional/Integrative Med (@kacdnp91) November 2, 2023

We are shotgunning lots of DNA into billions of people.  Some of this DNA may hit germ lines, it may hit stem cells, it may hit sperm, it may hit egg.  If you do the numbers, the number of LNPs that we're putting in these things they're in the 50-billion range to maybe 100-billion range.  If 1% of these get to the ovaries, there's only 300,000 oocytes, so you're talking about 40 to 400 million maybe of these things hitting 300,000 oocytes.  There's a chance that this stuff gets into the germ line, and we can't rule that out.  That is done now on billions of people and it's almost mandated.  This is a radical decay in biomedical ethics community that this has occured, a massive departure from where we were back in the days when we were thinking about CRISPR babies, i.e., designer babies, first ones born in 2018. Why are we tolerating this experimental use on tools that are poorly characterized, mandated with liability protection?

[Germ line refers to the sex cells (eggs and sperm) that sexually reproducing organisms use to pass on their genomes from one generation to the next (parents to offspring).  This is what Bill Gates' scientists and those hired by Fauci target: your sacred future.  They could care less about your health.  They are avowed eugenicists.]

When Kevin says it's in the germ line he's talking about genomic changes in the ovaries, that means your children will have those genomic changes and then their children will, right? 

Forever, yes.  Sperm and egg are germ lines if it hits your stem cells, like in your bone marrow, you can run into cancer problems.  Those are immune privial cells, so they don't get cleaned up by the immune system and these things end up persisting probably for the rest of your life if it's in your stem cells.

REP. THOMAS MASSIE: The government only relented because brave individuals like Eric refused to comply.

Thousands of restaurants and bars were permanently put out of business by mandates and lockdowns.

The government only relented because brave individuals like Eric refused to comply.

He put it all on the line. This is his story. https://t.co/qEmuJkrz11

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) October 27, 2023

ATTY TOM RENZ: Dr Mercola just put out a paper where he discussed ventilators. That concept for ventilators came from China

#3 - “No one told the patients, hey, you’re going to be put on this vent. It’s probably going to kill you, but it may protect the healthcare workers,” testified attorney @RenzTom to the Pennsylvania State Senate earlier this year. “No one told the families that.” pic.twitter.com/Tk8t1f7iY1

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) November 1, 2023

And she has audio recordings of a conversation between her and a nurse I recently publicized.  The nurse is talking about how they're killing people in the hospital, how their floor was doing the things that no other floor would do because, well, no other floor wanted to carry out the murder essentially.  They knew what was happening in a lot of cases.  Dr. Mercola just put out a paper where he discussed ventilators.  Ventilators, that concept for ventilators came from China.  If you put a ventilator on someone's face, they can't cough on you, so we'll keep the healthcare worker safe, right?

Even though that we knew that 75% or so of the people in New York City put on ventilators were dying, we kept doing it to protect the healthcare workers.  That was the theory.  Now no one talked about that when the patients were going in there.  there.  No one told the patients, "Hey, you're being protected . . .  you're going to be put on this.  this.   It's probably going to kill you, but it may protect the healthcare workers.  No one told the families that.  And by the way, we actually had whistleblower testimony from a yet-to-be unmasked whistleblower, and probably won't be, who worked from CMS.  I've got data from CMS that showed in a number of Texas hospitals that as high as 90% of patients put on the vent died.  90%.  Now they wouldn't let you try Ivermectin but they were more than willing to put you on the vent where you had a 90% fatality rate you're telling me that they didn't notice the you're telling me that the doctors on those floors I mean listen you know I can't say all doctors are created equal McCullough is ahead above most.  But if you got through med school,  you could probably . . . I would think you would probably be smart enough to notice that when 9 out of 10 of your patients and when they're put on the vent die, at least maybe you should ask the question, Is there a better way?  Why not let someone try Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine if you have a 9 out of 10 chance of dying anyways?

The reason that that's dear to my heart is because the people called me and I fought with hospital after hospital after hospital to try and save their lives.  And as I testified last year here, we essentially legislated these deaths into being by incentivizing the use of Remdesivir in protocols incentivizing the use of ventilators, and incentivizing, again not people recovering from COVID but people dying from COVID.  You got a cash bonus when someone died from COVID.  So it was and incentive to kill people and it worked incredibly well.  I'm happy to revisit that but again my testimony from last year covered that.  

Thank you to Naomi Brockwell.

Andrea Amico, Privacy4Cars.  

Modern cars are spying on us, but to what extent? 

Dale Wooden, aka, Woody, is a digital tracking expert and former instructor for a vehicle forensic company. 

Sam Curry, a famous car hacker who researches car vulnerabilities.  

"Car Hacking: The New Frontier of Cybersecurity," Conner Ivens, Tanium, October 3, 2022.  

TOPICS COVERED IN THIS SERIES

*  How easy it is to hack modern cars?  

*  And how strangers can get real-time access to your car cameras.

*  Explores trackers in cars that you had no idea existed like the radio signals beaconed out by your tires that can be used to track you even if you're doing 70 miles an hour down the freeway. 

*  We dive into the perverse incentives that drive companies to collect as much data about you as possible and look at the history of when this all started. 

"Toyota Japan Exposed Millions of Vehicles' Location Data for a Decade," Zach Whittaker, Tech Crunch, May 12, 2023.

Spoiler alert: it's been going on far longer than you ever imagined.  And don't even get me started on used cars.  We look at how the previous owner of your car might still have access to all your car's remote features, tracking tools, and cameras. And we explain how to wipe your own information and location history from your car before you sell it.  These are the kinds of things we investigate as we dive under the hood of car privacy in the series. 

WHAT DATA IS YOUR CAR COLLECTING? 

What data is siphoned from your car every time you hit the road?

John McElroy,

"Your car knows where you're going it knows your kind of driving habits."

In short the modern car has become a privacy nightmare.

Andrea

Cars collect a lot of data and I don't know that consumers really understand how much data is being collected by vehicles the new trend in automotive is to talk about the software defined vehicles

"All about Software Defined Vehicle," Renault Group, April 24, 2023.  

Which essentially means turning cars into smartphones.

In what ways are cars like smartphones?  Well first, they both act as tracking devices, emitting all kinds of radio signals that can be used to pinpoint your location.

Woody,

Your car is a cell phone.  Your car is a wireless hotspot.  Your car is a Wi-Fi receiver, and your car is a Bluetooth transmitter and receiver.

But there are other important similarities too.  Just as we often think of our phones as singular entities that send off data to Google and Apple, we regard cars the same way, sending off our data to Mazda or Toyota.  But with our phones, data sharing doesn't stop with the device manufacturer because we then go ahead and install a hundred different apps on it and each of these apps also sends our data to countless companies.  It turns out that car is actually working a similar way cars are platforms where a lot of other services are bolted on top most consumers don't realize that when they're driving you know there's a hundred s of companies literally that are collecting data from that vehicle and profiling you.

Lauren Smith,

Some information might be going to the manufacturer.  Some may be staying locally on the car.  Some may be going to your insurance company.  Some may be going to a technology that you've opted in to use.

So exactly what information is being collected and where it's going is pretty hard to figure out.  Varying by the make and model of the car, however, one thing we know for sure about basically all modern cars is: data is being harvested by the trunk load. 

Sam Curry:

The easiest way to figure out what exactly your car is tracking and has access to is to just open the app.  

Sam Curry has spent a lot of time examining these car apps where you do things like check the engine status and check your vehicle's cameras.

If you ever wanted to see where your car is at, or like start your car, or unlock your car, you can now do that with your phone.

The actual data that gets logged by the car  includes video feeds, microphone feeds.  The actual GPS location like overtime is 100% being logged.  Your car has the systems built in that'll actually log every interaction with the vehicle so whether or not you unlock the car, turn the engine on, the air conditioner on, starting an engine, or finding a vehicle's location.

These are generally marketed as really convenient features for consumers.  

Being able to control and locate your vehicle via like your phone is like a really cool thing.

But it's also important to remember this fundamental principle:

Woody:

If the app is free you are the product.

Sam Curry:

By just like using the apps, you're kind of just giving that data to that company.  They'll probably . . . hold it in perpetuity.

And often we're not just handing our data to those companies . We are granting carte blanche to share our sensitive information with countless third parties.