Is this also not a good reason to not set up auto pay in the case of data breaches?

No.

Sure it may not be connected to your lemmy account, but does no other personal info about you link to that data?

That personal data is already in their system whether or not I use autopay. I’m pretty sure my mortgage provider has my name and address on file. So does the energy company, my internet provider, etc.

Also, not doing automatic payments doesn’t even prevent them from having my bank account number. If I manually transfer the money they can see the source account number.

I won’t share it because it could be used to link my Lemmy account to my real life identity, not because you could use it to access my account.

If it was such a secret and sensitive number, why does every company blast it all over the place? Pretty much every company will have their bank account number in their letterhead and on the ‘contact information’ page of their website.

Here is a list of all bank account numbers used by the Dutch tax service (the Dutch equivalent of the IRS). Should be plenty of money in those accounts.

NewsflashL: the world does not revolve around the US.

Maybe that’s true if you live in a country with an archaic banking system. Here in Europe, you can do nothing with just my IBAN (International Bank Account Number) other than send me money. Anything else requires multi-step verification.

It’s so absurdly big. Our galaxy (the Milky Way) is estimated to have between 100 and 400 billion stars in it. For a long time we thought our galaxy was all there was, it wasn’t until 1925 when Edwin Hubble was able to prove that M31 was not a nebula or cluster of stars in our galaxy, but in fact an entirely different galaxy altogether that we realized there are more galaxies out there.

Look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field picture

This was a taken by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a basically empty bit of space 2.4 by 2.4 arcminutes in size (for comparison, the moon has an apparent size of about 30 arcminutes, or half a degree). So an absolutely tiny part of the sky. It contains about 10.000 galaxies.

The observable universe is estimated to have between 200 billion and 2 trillion galaxies in it, with on average about 100 billion stars per galaxy. It’s absolutely mind blowing.

So? It’s not like they are a secret. What are any potential hackers going to to with my bank account numbers? Send me money?

They aren’t allowed to just do that. Being allowed to directly withdraw money from customers accounts who authorized it is a privilege, one that banks can withdraw if they find a company abuses it.

Dafuq. Glad that’s not a thing here.

Why would you not want automatic payment?