Anonymous CC: Does “Entropay” really not hand my personal data over to a company - are there alternatives?
"Do you guys know any options that are accessible to any global citizen? Prepaid and stored value cards are anonymous. For an arbitrary reason, the really anonymous ones only allow you to load $500 but there is no regulation that dictates this amount. In the USA, these cards are exempt from being declared at border crossings. Not because they look like credit cards, but because they are exempt by the US Treasury and Customs. The cons is that there are generally fees to use them. US DOJ has done research showing that some groups take advantage of the exemption moving upwards of $50,000 a day between borders, but Congress is fine with this exemption and the burden is always on the government to determine ""illicit origin"". Stigmatizing how money is moved is only a 30 year old phenomenon, but many free nations do not really have capital controls, they only care that you pay taxes and that the integrity of their stock markets are upheld. Aside from that there are no qualms about anonymity, except from your neighbors but they dont matter for a global citizen. In theory, the UK should have more flexibility in anonymity options, such as stored value cards with higher limits."
Am I the only one not concerned about this? No one is going to look at my information up close. I'm a data point that allows them to see a trend in a larger population or an anonymous customer they have no more concern for than the people to whom companies send junk mail. "Often in life we have to choose the lesser of evils.  Whole Life as an investment vs. Term Life and invest the difference is one of these times. I assume the following statement is true. ""The commissions on whole life are sick. The selling agent gets upward of 90% of your first year's premium."" But how does that compare to investing in mutual funds (as one alternative)?   Well according to Vanguard the average mutual fund keeps 60% of the total returns over the average investors lifetime. And of course income taxes (on withdrawal) consume another 30% (or more) of the dollars you withdraw (from a tax deferred retirement plan like a 401k.) http://www.fool.com/School/MutualFunds/Performance/Record.htm So you have to pick your poison and make the choice that fits your view of the future. Personally I don't believe my cost of living in retirement will be radically lower than my cost of living while working. Additionally I believe income tax rates will be higher in the future than the in the present and so deferring taxes (like a 401k) doesn't make sense to me.  (In 1980 a 401k made sense when the average 401k participant was paying over 50% in federal income tax and also got a pension.) So paying 90% of my first year's premium rather than 60% of my gains over my lifetime seems acceptable.  And borrowing tax free against my life insurance once retired (with no intention of paying it back) will, I believe, provide greater income than a 401k could." Our Finance organization does much of their reporting out of Excel being fed out of SSAS cubes, and beyond that, there's significant need for PowerPivot charts, forecasting, and Monte Carlo simulation, as well as significant use of various plugins and VBA code.  We kept Office 365 ProPlus around for Finance and HR.  For the rest of the organization, they don't need particularly advanced capabilities for slides, drawing, or word processing, or light spreadsheet capability and we're quite content to output to PDF, Google Sheets, and other things as needed, as well as using cost free alternatives to MS Exchange/Outlook, Visio, and Project.  The collaboration is a particular plus, and Google Hangouts is really convenient working from multiple sites/screen sharing.  We've done our best to keep our data centralized and universally accessible, in lieu of living in Excel spreadsheets and MS Access databases as tribal knowledge. "Zip code, as well as billing address, is used in conjunction with the Address Verification Service (AVS).  AVS is a web (or phone) service that actually verifies the address with the billing address on file with the issuing bank.  It does not use the credit card stripe.  You can see more information from various sources such as bank merchant help pages like Bank of America's. As far as what is stored on the stripe, it varies some by bank (as there are some ""optional"" areas).  The standards are discussed here. Fields include your account number, name, the expiration date, some card-specific stuff, and then the discretionary section.  I would not expect much in terms of address type information there. So - the answer to your question is that they can't really take much more than your name and CC #, unless you give it to them.  If you give a false zip code, you may have your purchase rejected.  They certainly do keep track of the credit card number, and I would suppose that is the most valuable piece to them; they can see you make purchases across time and know for a fact that it's the same exact person (since it's the same card). Additionally, zip codes for AVS from pay-at-the-pump are supposedly not generally used for marketing (see this article for example).  That is probably not true at at-the-register (in-person) collections, most of those aren't for AVS anyway.  Even California permits the pay-at-the-pump zip verification as long as it's only used for that (same article).  I would assume any information given, though, is collected for marketing purposes." "This doesn't answer your question, but as an aside, it's important to understand that your second and third bullet points are completely incorrect; while it used to be true that Swiss bank accounts often came with ""guarantees"" of neutrality and privacy, in recent years even the Swiss banks have been caving to political pressure from many sides (especially US/Obama), with regards to the most extreme cases of criminals. That is to say, if you're a terrorist or a child molester or in possession of Nazi warcrime assets, Swiss banks won't provide the protection you're interested in. You might say ""But I'm not a terrorist or a pervert or profiteering of war crimes!"" but if you're trying so hard to hide your personal assets, it's worth wondering how much longer until Swiss banks make further concessions to start providing information on PEOPLE_DOING_WHAT_YOU_ARE_DOING. Not to discourage you, this is just food for thought. The ""bulletproof"" protection these accounts used to provide has been compromised. I work with online advertising companies, and a number of people I know in the industry get sued on a regular basis for copyright or trademark infringement or spamming; most of these people still trust Swiss bank accounts, because it's still the best protection available for their assets, and because Swiss banks haven't given up details on someone for spamming... yet." but what about non-identifying information like emails or even telephone numbers? Are you allowed to do this? Most countries have privacy laws that would explicitly forbid companies from selling data not just to other companies, but even to other divisions within the company without explicit approval from customer.  There are adequate regulatory controls that would stop companies from indulging in such practises. However tons of smaller / un-registered companies or companies operating from certain countries are definitely a source for such practises. I use Banktivity.  It's very much not free, but it automatically downloads all my bank and credit card activity and has excellent reporting options. "Is this a hypothetical question? It sounds like a combination of ""can my amount owed on a card go negative (i.e. a credit) and can I deposit to someone else's XXX account. My wife kept her last name. when I pay her charge card I've never gotten rejected, I don't see why this wouldn't work if a stranger gave me their number and address to make payment."