I know they’re all bad for privacy to an extent, which is why I specified “least bad.”
This is for casual use, as someone concerned about surveillance capitalism, digital privacy, social cooling and the like. I do not have a high threat model. I am looking to balance privacy and convenience. I am not going to teach my grandma how to use monero, and it isn’t always a reasonable option to use cash or mail a check.
The big services in the US I know of are:
- PayPal: shares your data with 600+ companies
- Venmo: owned by PayPal
- Apple Cash: Requires an Apple device, not an option for many
- Google Pay: it’s Google, and it doesn’t work on custom ROMs like GrapheneOS
- Facebook Messenger: apparently you can send money on there, but I think “there’s zero chance I’m making a Facebook account and I’m especially not linking my bank to it” needs no explanation in this community
- Cash App: owned by Square, might be a decent option?
- Zelle: Not supported by all banks (I don’t think it’s supported by mine and I definitely have friends that use unsupported banks)
If anyone knows of better options, or tips to minimize shared data while using any of the above options, please elaborate.
Sure. That’s the ridiculous thing about them. I bet they’re handled within a split second on some computer system. But somehow the bank has to mess with us and waits until monday afternoon to process the transfer I did friday evening. Though some banks are better than others. And the only reason I can come up with is, they like to steer customers away from their own services and towards PayPal…
Doesn’t somebody actually approve the transaction?
There’s no way, there’s billions of them every day, who can look at all of them?
I actually don’t know, I’ve never worked at a bank. But it’d be a massive surprise to me if they were. All companies have to save money and no one has money to hire hundreds of people to click the same button all day. And computers aren’t just cheaper, they also don’t make mistakes with math and they can run additional code to cross-reference things, detect anomalies and fraud and so on. While it’s almost impossible for a human to judge whether me transferring $2600 to a random account number is legitimate or not…
What is interesting is that not all transfers are approved at 6:00 in the morning. Some of them take more hours until it’s done. Wondering why. Maybe some are automatic and the ones flagged require manual intervention?