Every time you make a purchase, whether it’s with a credit card, a buy-now-pay-later app, or even a digital wallet, chances are that transaction is being logged, analyzed, and monetized. Your payment history isn’t just between you and the business you’re paying. As a general rule, it’s going to be passed along to unknown advertisers, data brokers, and platforms.

Some companies are upfront about it. Others bury it in the fine print. Either way, tracking is the norm, and opting out usually isn’t as simple as it sounds. This is how traditional payments were built. Not just to move money, but to extract information.

Even when customers trust the surface-level security of a payment method, what happens to the data behind the scenes is often out of their hands. A recent report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) pointed out that many financial institutions share consumer financial data with third parties for purposes far beyond the original transaction, and very often without explicit consent from the consumer. In almost all cases, consumers are completely unaware of just how far and wide their financial footprint travels.

This isn’t a fringe concern. It’s a structural issue baked into how most non-cash payments work, whether using a credit card, digital wallet, or payment app.

Flexa was built with a different premise: payments should work without any knowledge of who you are or what you’re buying.

Consumer information is the business model 

Credit card networks and fintech apps rely on aggregating user data to operate—not only to manage fraud and streamline operations, but also to extract insights, personalize marketing, and generate new revenue streams. In some cases, that means sharing granular details, like purchase history and even clothing sizes, with other businesses.

According to reporting by the Financial Times, Revolut faced criticism in early 2024 after using anonymized customer transaction data in a marketing campaign without clear user consent. Although the data was anonymized,  the campaign sparked backlash over how casually sensitive financial behavior was repurposed for advertising.

Why does this matter? Because the more data customers give up, the less control they have. Personal information can be used to influence financial decisions, shape the prices displayed, or even restrict access to services. It can be exposed in a breach or misused in worst-case scenarios without a customer’s knowledge. And once that data is out there, it’s virtually impossible to get it back.

The risk isn’t just abstract, it’s growing. As companies race to monetize user behavior and AI models train on every available data point, consumers’ financial activity becomes just another source of fuel, with the average consumer having little say in how it’s used.

Digital assets promise privacy 

Digital assets were born out of a desire to create a more open, decentralized financial system that gives people greater autonomy, with fewer intermediaries and more control by design. However, when it comes to privacy, the reality can be more complex.

Bitcoin and Ethereum, for example, operate on public blockchains, where transactions are publicly recorded for all to see. That’s great for auditability and trust in the system, but it also means that with the right tools, it’s possible to trace payments and link them to real-world identities. It’s not a flaw, it’s a design choice. However, it means that payers still need to be thoughtful about how and where they transact.

Privacy-focused blockchains like Zcash have gone further, implementing shielded addresses and zero-knowledge proofs to make transaction details completely private. These are important innovations, but the learning curve can be steep. Research shows that even among crypto users, there is a lack of clarity about how privacy features can work.

The good news is that the foundation is solid. Digital assets are still one of the most promising paths toward more secure, user-controlled payments. But the systems they interact with need better tools and infrastructure to fully protect user privacy in everyday commerce.

In a time of economic uncertainty, when trust in major institutions is eroding and privacy feels harder than ever to maintain, people are hungry for financial tools that don’t feel extractive. The demand is there. What’s been missing is a payments platform that meets it.

That’s where Flexa comes in—delivering on some of the original promises of digital assets by making them work without needing to track or profile users.

Flexa was built to eliminate tracking and profiling

Flexa works without tracking customer data, not because we mask or encrypt it after collection, but because we don’t collect it in the first place. Better yet, we take special care to prevent any other parties from being able to track your Flexa payments if they were to ever intercept the relevant transaction signatures or payment identifiers—each one is as uniquely random and unguessable as the next.

No names or emails shared with the businesses you pay. Absolutely no transaction profiling. Just fast, secure, fully fraud-resistant payments that don’t require giving up control. This isn’t a compromise between privacy and performance. It’s a better foundation altogether—one that doesn’t rely on surveillance to operate.

Privacy by design is the way forward

Regulators are trying to keep up. Frameworks like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aim to give consumers more power over their personal data, but enforcement is patchy, and global financial systems still move faster than policy. Advances in privacy-preserving tech, like zero-knowledge proofs and decentralized identity, are showing real promise, but widespread adoption is far ahead of us.

In the meantime, the best protection is using technology whose security doesn't depend on customer data to begin with. Flexa is proving that payments can work instantly, reliably, and securely without watching your every move.

Curious where you can use Flexa or want to explore how it works? Visit flexa.co to learn more.