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?
Yes and no cash for the physical world does indeed protect your privacy properly. However, you do run into the issue that you have to trust. Your government’s currency, which at least for me, I do not. So Monero is also a way of getting out from the government currency that I believe is being debased and devalued.