Comment by drakonka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drakonka | Hacker News Reader

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I've never even heard of Google Voice and now feel like I've been living under a rock. Could you elaborate on how you use this? For example:

* Do you use the same Google Voice number as your actual Google account phone number, or just for other sites? If the former, how does it work with Google 2FA (ie if you are logged out of Google account I imagine you can't access you Voice number either?)

* Are you concerned with losing access to your Google Voice number if Google decides to ban your account one day? Regular phone numbers seem a bit less nebulous in that phone providers don't seem to just suddenly decide to ban you and your number as much as Google, Amazon, et al. Then again I have no data to back up this impression.

* What made you pick Google Voice over another VoIP option?

* Do you worry about Voice going away with Google Fi?

Not Op but I can few of your questions.

* I am using same google voice number as my actual google account. I live with constant fear that if I am locked out of google account then I cannot access my voice number. Only thing I do to avoid this scenario is to have back up code written somewhere. * Trust on Google * as of now no

Thank you. I read that Google Voice only provides US numbers, which I have a sneaking suspicion might become a problem for me if my address is not in the US. Coupled with not really wanting to be locked in to Google for another service, I did some more research. A provider called Sonetel seemed to have decent reviews and had great pricing for what I needed, but when reading through their docs I noticed them say their numbers cannot be used for identity verification with third party services :( So it's back to the drawing board. But the whole idea of:

a) Not using my personal number for online services

b) Using a virtual number instead of a phone provider SIM

...seems worth pursuing. I think a) above is more important for me than b), but my current phone provider does not yet support eSIM and my phone does not support dual sim, and I really don't want to carry two phones around...

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