Stripe demanding address

mullinggroove

While the official Kagi documentation states:

What information is needed to accurately calculate sales taxes?
Only the country and, if tax rates vary within the country, the state or zip code as well.

Stripe still requires a full address, not just a country code. While i have no issue providing my country code for tax purposes, giving out my personal address in order to use a search engine just seems out of proportion, especially for a privacy focused search engine.

Please contact the Stripe team to limit the collected information to the bare minimum required (country code).

Vlad

mullinggroove In some countries like USA, sales tax is state to state, or even city to city. Can you contact support@kagi.com with more details about your situation.

mullinggroove

I checked several locales (to see if this was just a special thing about my region) and found out, it is required everywhere i checked (EU, UK, USA, Mexico).

The following are required from Stripe:

Full Name
Full Address
ZIP
Postal Code

Doxxing my home address and full name for a privacy search engine feels inappropriate on every level. Pls fix this with Stripe or stop promoting Kagi as "privacy friendly".

johen

Going on a little rant that has (mostly) nothing to do with Kagi: the state of online payments is pretty grim for anyone that wants a little bit of privacy. Even with privacy focused services such as Kagi, Tuta, Proton, using crypto is harder than using the default mainstream payment services. I don't want stripe, or paypal, or anyone for that matter to know where my money is going, why is this so hard? Even crypto which was partly supposed to fix this is in a bad state where the only source to easily find it is through centralized exchanges that demand ID checks and what not.
The best way I found so far is to use a regular exchange and use it to buy Monero and withdraw it to my wallet, since it's the only true anonymous coin.

I know there are laws against money laundering and terrorism and I don't know what else, but those people will continue to use hard cash and gold and other sources, meanwhile the average joe that just wants to pay 10 bucks to search stuff on the web has to fork out his entire personal life details to a bunch of middle men that take a slice of that money and still sell your information to the highest bidder

carl

There's got to be a better way. Other online services I've used have not been as specific and strict regarding sales tax. I don't think there's anything special about Kagi compared to them.

I don't want stripe, or paypal, or anyone for that matter to know where my money is going, why is this so hard?

If you get scammed by a seller, you'll want them to know where your money went, so you can make a chargeback.