The Federal Trade Commission issued orders to eight companies offering surveillance pricing products and services that incorporate data about consumers’ characteristics and behavior.
After reading such news I have an obvious question. Does anyone know a PayPal-like service, that allows to hide the destination of my transactions from Mastercard / bank, but with a good privacy policy? Or how else can I restrict the usage of my financial data by mastercard or bank?
Unfortunately there are a very small amount of places when I can pay with crypto... I do not want to face also questions from AML officers. I'm not a journalist in the dangerous country or political activist, so Monero looks like an overhead for me.
Monero is for everybody. The most common things I purchase on a monthly basis in Monero are Domino's Pizza and groceries. And as far as I'm aware, neither of those things are illegal. Monero is money, just like a $100 bill is money (currently). It is perfectly legal to hold and use Monero.
Well, there are plenty of places that do accept Monero. Take a look at https://monerica.com and https://xmrbazaar.com which is a small but growing marketplace to buy and sell anything you wish (excluding illegal goods) .
Besides the other user's recommendation, have a look at coincards. Haven't used them yet, but they have gift cards for a lot of things, online and physical brands too.
This is not accurate. Monero offers a very high degree of privacy and anonymity. So does Bitcoin lightning, to a lesser degree. Lightning transactions don't go on chain and are known only to: sender, recipient, and intermediate nodes, if any.