With Privacy, you can create virtual debit cards to protect your online payments
Meet Privacy, a new startup with a confusing name but an interesting product. Privacy lets you generate a virtual burner card every time you need to enter your credit card number on the web.
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2016, Privacy's pitch was simple: generate a burner virtual debit card for every web checkout so a merchant breach can't expose your real card number. What makes this launch worth revisiting is where the idea went — the company later rebranded as Lithic and turned the same card-issuing machinery into an API business for other companies.
By mid-2021 that pivot had attracted serious capital, with a $60M raise at a reported $800M valuation on top of a $43M Series B led by Bessemer. Meanwhile Apple shipped the same core feature to consumers, letting cardholders generate virtual card numbers for non-Apple Pay purchases on demand — validation that burner-card issuance had become table stakes rather than a moat.
First-order effects
- Consumers gain per-merchant card numbers that cap fraud exposure to a single relationship, while merchants and processors must handle transactions from cards that may be single-use or merchant-locked.
Second-order effects
- Once virtual numbers proved out, platform players moved in: Apple built one-tap virtual numbers into Apple Card, and Privacy itself pivoted from selling the feature to consumers toward licensing issuance via APIs to businesses.
Third-order effects
- Consumer-facing privacy tools tend to collapse into either big-platform features or B2B infrastructure — Privacy's path from burner cards to Lithic's $800M-valued API business is the template, and the same pattern shows up adjacent in DoNotPay's account-sharing extension and Phreeli's zero-knowledge phone service.
The trend: Payment privacy is migrating from standalone consumer apps toward embedded infrastructure — issued invisibly by platforms and via APIs — with independent startups surviving by becoming the plumbing.