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Comment by WallyFunk | Hacker News Reader

I presume any large tech company will ask for my number, at least, at some stage. This is why I have a number on standby in-case that happens, and this is not my main phone number. I have a separate number for Big Tech™, and another private one for giving out to friends & family that I don't attach to any online service.

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Then those friends and family will use the Upload Contacts feature of their: FB, Tiktok, snapchat, messenger, whatsapp, instagram.

And suddenly you're in the system.

This is why there needs to be a privacy.com for phone numbers. (A single secondary number doesn't work. One per service / one per person, and the ability to quickly invalidate or re-issue compromised numbers, is necessary to truly make reselling useless.)

I typically use 5sim(no affiliation) for phone number verification, although the phone numbers don’t persist so 2fa and otp doesn’t work with it, which is required for some services like Hotstar.

I personally used Telnyx, which usually isn't detected as "VoIP" because they offer actual SIMs with these numbers, usually for IoT applications. Sometimes they are still detected though, which annoys me a lot because usually the services that bother to do that detection are the ones I least want to have my phone number (ex: OpenAI)

I've resorted to hawking sites like BugMeNot and using the trash/spam accounts there, which usually manage to have some phone number or have performed some sort of weird exploit to get into their system somehow. It's how I managed to play quite a bit with ChatGPT around the tail end of 2022 when it first came out, but these days the rate limits are so strict that I can't ever get a single message through any of the shared/trash accounts (which is probably their objective).

There are online services that get you a single use phone number for a couple cents (depending on the service – Instagram is 30–50 cents for example). I use SMS-REG but I'm not happy with it lately (many times SMS just doesn't go through; and credit refilling is tedious).

Won't help with friends uploading your number to WhatsApp though.

I very explicitly stated "a single secondary number doesn't work" so this is the exact sort of thing that is not a solution to this problem.

There are a million services that give you a single additional phone number, but AFAIK none that let you generate any number of completely anonymous virtual numbers that forward to your real number, like what privacy.com does. (I think there are a bunch that let you buy each additional phone number and have them each contain their own inbox and everything, but none of them really act as just free relay services like what privacy.com does.)

privacy.com also locks each number to a single merchant, allows me to instantly revoke numbers that have been compromised or that are no longer going to be used, allows me to get credit for fraudulent purchases without having to file a real chargeback (I do realize this doesn't really have a phone-number equivalent, but you get the idea), etc. absolutely invaluable protection layer.

Yeah, this is not a single additional number though – they give you a new random number for like 5 minutes which is enough to set up the account but obviously not enough to use it afterwards. I guess they do it so that they can allow reusing the number with other services.

Why there's no service generating multiple permanent virtual numbers is a mystery to me, too. They don't seem much more scarce than credit card numbers. On the other hand, only Privacy.com seems to allow issuing that many cards (in contrast, Revolut only allows you to have 5 permanent cards + 1 single use card – this seems to be the usual limit in other banks as well), so they might know some kind of a secret sauce.

privacy.com does have a secret sauce - a direct partnership with Visa that allows them to register cards that don't show up as "pre-paid". As far as I know, nobody else has this. I don't remember what they used before - perhaps still Visa, just pre-paid.

I don't think there is any major residential phone provider that would offer that sort of partnership to the point where you could trick services like OpenAI into thinking that the number is that of a real person. Aaand spinning up any new phone provider for this purpose is like registering a brand new super-blockable ASN for a VPN's IP addresses.

FWIW, Telnyx allows you to keep phone numbers indefinitely, and receive/forward SMS messages and phone calls. But they do not offer an integration out of the box - you'd have to code that up yourself using their APIs. And each phone number you allocate has to be paid for individually. And also, Telnyx is super detactable and blockable, of course.

Slightly tangential but I'm wondering how hard would it be to build a “bring your own eSIM” kind of service that you can register an external SIM profile QR code with and it would host it with a SIP interface for voice + some kind of API for SMS, and allow you to switch active line between different SIM profiles on the go. (Charge something like 10 ¢/mo per profile stored, and $5/mo per active line?)

There simply aren’t enough phone numbers for that to be viable.

Honestly if companies started realizing this they might stop requiring them. A lot of people don't even have a phone number.

Though maybe they would move to something more invasive like ID or something... which may or may not be even rarer, but is definitely more personal.

> Honestly if companies started realizing this they might stop requiring them. A lot of people don't even have a phone number.

If you're too poor (or paranoid) to have a phone number, you aren't much value as a lead. The current system qualifies that (a) you're not a bot, (b) you have money to spend, and (c) you're in a specific metro area (and not Antarctica as you claim). Self-reported location, IP and phone number can all be spoofed, but 2/3 data points aligning is close enough.

There's no incentive to onboard unvetted accounts.

To clarify my point: there are enough phone numbers for all people to have a few. There are not enough phone numbers for the combinatorial explosion of every person-to-person pair having a unique phone number.

Maybe there should be. I personally would love to usher in a digital age where you can only call someone by a passkey unique to you, and it's normal/easy to generate these and transfer them over to people/services that need them.

But of course this still leaves the problem of people who don't even have a phone.

The POTS (plain old telephone system) is explicitly designed for discoverability. They used to physically throw a book that mapped numbers to names and addresses on your doorstep for free, and chained the same directory to every public telephone. Fighting against a fundamental design goal of a system is a fool’s errand. The features you are looking for can be easily accomplished over the internet, and they smell very similar to PGP and also feel pretty adjacent to Signal/WhatsApp with some variation. Heck if we’re limiting it to off the shelf consumer solutions, FaceTime with custom email domains matches the description if you squint hard enough.

The vast majority of people find what you are describing to be completely impractical to the point of uselessness.

Well I would still like my bank to support something other than fucking SMS for two-factor authentication.

Which number do you use for online banking and similar? Sometimes it is hard for me to figure out where to draw the line. Then you have PayPal and CashApp and other things in more of an in-between area. And then you have certain services like iCloud where it might make more sense to use your Real Number for some of their features and exceptions to the rule have to be made

Curiously I don't want to shell money on a secondary phone number when I think or believe the other party shouldn't ask for it. I'd also have to maintain it battery and credit wise.

I know I should though if I want to use ig and others free of mind.

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