Perhaps this is a good reason to use Google Voice and not give anyone the underlying real phone number with cell service.
It’s worth the $1/month expense to have a number to hand out to people I don’t want to be available to.
And, in a way, it keeps me available when I’m overseas and don’t have my usual SIM card installed.
I use VoIP.ms
I wonder if the fact that services like this won't work on VoIP numbers is a reason why. Regardless of the motivation, it's annoying because I don't give out my real mobile number to hardly anyone for this--and spam call/text avoidance--reason.
Ie: some firm is renting VoIP numbers for a month for $1, creating accounts on 100 services and then moving to the next VoIP number.
Perhaps the VoIP firms support this whenever they get a block of « virgin » numbers before putting them in their regular pool of numbers for rent.
If Venmo were a brick and mortar business, they could just ask you to come by a local office so they can verify your ID in person. But they don't have a local office; so the reasonable and profitable solution is to preemptively ban you.
Thanks
I use a SIP desk phone, have calls forwarded to my mobile, and also get voicemail recordings in mail.
(Going back to the original article -- I can't say if this actually protects you from such tracking. Maybe stalkers could find your actual mobile number by some other means, or for all I know customer-identifying parameters could be used without even knowing the phone number.)
No software or server running on my end. It’s all on theirs.
I originally set it up when my phone provider wanted to charge me several dollars per month for a less useful voicemail system, so I set up such a thing by telling my provider to forward unanswered calls to that other DID.
I wonder why that is. Maybe outdated databases?
e.g. if my "real" email account is through Yahoo, but I tell the public about my GMail address which autoforwards to Yahoo, it wouldn't be straightforward (though it would be obviously possible) for Yahoo to deal with a request stated as "Please give me info about the email account, danspublicemailaddress@gmail.com".
Especially messaging providers identify users based on phone numbers, but also a lot of websites started requiring a phone number verification. Those virtual phone numbers are often rejected. This can cause situations in which you have different phone numbers on 2 services.
#2 They'd be helping their rivals with such data
#3 Sharing might kill the golden goose (bad press etc)
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Consider the NSA for an example of what's possible. They were doing what Snowden outed for years. And not a peep. Actually that's not true. There were plenty of 'peeps' but they were brutally silenced. See, for instance, Thomas Drake [1]. He tried to obey the law relying on whistleblower laws and an assumption of good will from other government organizations. He got destroyed and lost everything he had, and was unable to effectively get his message out on top of it all. That's another topic though...