You nailed it. Some time ago, my Amex business card had a feature called Private Payments. Basically, whenever you wanted to make a purchase, you would generate

You nailed it. Some time ago, my Amex business card had a feature called Private Payments. Basically, whenever you wanted to make a purchase, you would generate a one-time use number that could be used in place of your actual number. Not sure why they did away with it, but I figured it either became a hassle for them to support it or someone figured out how to defraud it. The latter would be insanely ironic, of course. But, your point in general regarding the fact that divulging your info for one simple payment can expose you so horrendously is very true. Same with other info, like your SSN. Too much of our current approach to "security" is based on protecting access to informarion, which is the core problem. In my business, we work with a number of retailers, large and small. It is breath-taking how exposed and naive some of these guys are. And, they are handling personal info for millions of people. In general, we should have learned long ago that it is impossible to secure the data in all cases, so we need systems and processes that assume the data will fall into the wrong hands.