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Comment by barbariangrunge | Hacker News Reader

I think the idea is to give your real email and phone number to real friends and family; then you use the relayed one with online services who might sell or lose the data. Then you could presumably ditch the related info after the spam gets to be too much? Or maybe you just do it to be more anonymous?

It’s like the concept of a “burner phone” I think

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That's what I thought too but then I read about what is actually offered:

> You only get one phone number mask at this time. Once you choose your phone number mask, you cannot change it later.

That makes it impossible to use as a "burner" number.

But - originally - you give a number (be it real or Mozilla or "burner") in order to be contacted by someone (and then somehow it was leaked to the robocallers).

The moment you change or abandon the number (be it Mozilla or "burner") that someone won't be able to contact you anymore.

But if you keep it, with the burner at least that someone will still be able to call you at the end of the month (when the the robocallers will have already eaten the 50 minutes allowed by Mozilla).

It would kind of make sense if you could "open" the relay when you need to 2fa, and then you close it again after. With this usepattern you would only need one alias, that would be closed 99.9% of the time.

But if you can use a unique number per service, you now know which company is selling your PII and you could address that either by switching to a competitor or, depending on the legal specifics, sue/expose them.

From what I understand it is not "unlimited" numbers, just one, as said an "alias".

That's a shame, it wasn't entirely clear from the article but I assumed it must be multiple numbers since it didn't seem to me like it would be all that useful otherwise.

Unfortunately this only gives you a single unchangeable mask number.

So like google voice with less features?

textnow.com is free and what I have been using for years.

To save some people a click, it's US only

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