A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
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Not FOSS, but have you considered payment rings? I use Mclear ringpay. its effectiverly a prepaid debit card, which is stored inside a ring using contactless.
No battery, no recharging, no data.
thats how I’m solving the issue
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That’s real cool! Ever comes to the states I’d take a hard look at it.
The most techy: copy your bank card nfc (need some hacking)
The compromise: use apps that are not google pay, but still not foss
The easiest: just put your bank card in the case of your phone
The smartest: use monero
The god: use cash
Afaik just like Sim cards, the chip is a small computer that can encrypt or decrypt the secret stuff you need to make payments with it. So it’s pretty hard to just copy it.
Oh, it seems my knowledge is pretty outdated, it used to be possible, and i did it with few of my cards, but like 10 years ago
Theoretically it’s still possible, but it would not be as easy peasy as i did
Sorry for making too much noise with this one
Really? Something like that can run off of the ambient radiation on a card reader?
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/7901552
Says that comment doesnt exist
Works for me 😅
what lemmy client do you use
Eternity 😅
Yeah. Sim cards work the same.
copy your bank card nfc - do you know a guide for this?
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/7901552
From what I’ve been able to find, this is not possible with modern cards: https://android.stackexchange.com/a/21986/283347
it sure is possible, but not with the amount of work anyone would be willing to put into it.
Damn, I was getting hopeful there for a moment.
You won’t find FOSS.
There are alternatives to Google Pay on Android however. My bank (a “Sparkasse”, German government-owned bank) has its own mobile payment app which appears to just simulate a Visa/Mastercard’s NFC chip. IME it works pretty much on any terminal that accepts physical contactless cards.
Banks have much stricter privacy policies by law and I need to accept their terms anyways.
I also couldn’t find anything. Not even any banking apps support it because they all work with google pay on android.
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Yeah it’s stupid and not privacy friendly, but it’s not like any bank is privacy friendly nowadays from my experience
I use Garmin Pay on my watch, doesn’t require internet to work at stores
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Not if you use offline
Alternatively you can take off the chip from the card and glue to your phone 😏
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I dont want to use them either but because of lack of alternatives I do use contactless pay of my banks app itself. Does require NFC etc
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You could look at the Taler Project. It is still probably years away from becoming usable but it is a really interesting and promising payment system.
Is it possible to pay with NFC? I read the docs but haven’t found anything
The GNU Taler wallet app on Android supports NFC communication, but I have not tried it yet.
I think right now their demo is using QR codes. I don’t think the jump from QR to NFC is that difficult but I could be wrong and I don’t know what their pipeline is at the moment.
Years ago there were some multi-account credit cards floating around. Maybe that could be open sourced… Not sure…
Afaik there are none, but I don’t really get why I should use these services anyway. Pulling out my phone is only marginally faster than just using a card directly. They do improve security, kinda like a real life PayPal they prevent others from getting your card on file, but it’s not worth the cost in privacy imo. That’s part of the reason I use a credit card in the first place: Credit companies act as a proxy between you and your bank account and they offer some fraud protection.
Use cash if you want privacy. The card is linked to your name too.
Or even better, make Trotsky happy, use barter
And be sure that Visa and MasterCard are mining your data.
Yep. A PCI DSS update plus the credit card corps would have to allow something like un-chipped virtual cards to be accepted (to be clear there are virtual cards already, but just not attached to wireless pay). At this point both Apple and Samsung don’t want to lose this revenue , so yeah it’s a real bummer.
The whole money system is proprietary and anti privacy at its core. Use cash, move money away from private banks and into central bank money (cash). Not really traceable. Perfect.
Dont forget Monero. Fully FOSS cash for the digital age
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Money laundromats.
Directly, not many places. Through gift cards. Absolute fucktons of places. I have been purchasing my groceries with Monero for over a year now, every single month, and bought some home insulation with Monero, and bought Thanksgiving dinner from a restaurant with Monero as well.
Edit: i also pay my phone bill with Monero
Edit 2: Truly, the only thing I have not figured out how to pay with Monero is direct debits, such as car payments, mortgage payments, etc. that require a bank and routing number. Anything payable with a credit or debit card is fair game.
The whole gift card secondary market is sketchy as fuck though. I’ve dipped my foot in a bit and it seems like most of the inventory is the result of scammers converting their gains into usable currency.
Not all of it for sure. Sometimes people just want to unload gift cards they’ll never use. But that seems like the exception rather than the rule.
Like, why is this dude from Nigeria selling tens of thousands of dollars worth of US-locked gift cards?
Also, all these large companies and regulatory bodies are completely aware of this shit. I don’t know why it’s tolerated.
The gift cards I purchase are from companies who specialize in the sale of cards such as coincards, coinsbee, and cake pay. These are all registered businesses, so there’s less likelihood of crazy crap like you mentioned.
Being a “registered business” doesn’t mean anything. Especially when they’re in loose jurisdictions with little to no laws or enforcement. And it sure doesn’t mean they aren’t sketchy and the origin of the cards isn’t ethically dubious or even illegal.
You don’t ever wonder how they pay like 50% (or less) on the card’s face value and resell them at 70-80% for a profit?
I worked a bit on a competitor service and the brokers are all not people I ever want to interact with again. We tried to pierce the veil a little bit and the least sketchy source examples we got were like mechanical turk workers getting paid in gift cards (wage theft basically), and immigrants trying to send money back home to their family from the US (something crypto was supposed to help with).
Coinsbee is german, coincards is canadian, and cake pay is US. Those don’t seem like very loose jurisdictions, and they don’t sell cards at a discount unless the retailer gives them a discount on the cards to begin with, and then they pass them on.
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Yeah I don’t think a FOSS equivalent will ever exist. Google pay isn’t just an app that gives the machine your card number, it’s an entire payment processing system like a bank.
Its closer than you think: GNU Taler is exactly that and they just announced that they will do a pilot with a German and an Hungarian coop bank.
https://taler.net/en/news/2024-02.html
I’m migrating to germany.
I do not get it! It sounds more like another crypto that a fiat payment system! Bother sender and receiver need Taler making it very un - interoperable. They also love stating that the receiver can be taxed. Lame!
No it has nothing to do with crypto currencies.
Its a payment system like credit cards or google pay, which also needs support on both sides.
And for it to ever get regulatory approval to work with existing banks and fiat currencies it will need to have some sort of seller transparency (i.e. tax transparency). But this is a big step forward for a digital payment system to have cash like buyer privacy, which no other digital payment system currently has (arguably not even crypto currencies).
Ok. I was reading about its Kudos Coin - but it seems that this is just a monopoly/play test currency for the system. The constant sycophantic notices about tax evasion etc are still lame! Hopefully it takes off but if I had to bet I would do so for it failing.
It’s an uphill battle, but GNU Taler is by far the best chance we have in over a decade, so it’s important to support it if possible.