What gets me are all of the places (like Venmo, et al) who pitch a fit if a user dares give them a not-a-real-mobile-number. Even if the number is SMS-capable, they complain.
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.
Not-a-real-phone-number accounts have a much higher than average probability of being a bot or a scammer. (That's because scammers can automate signing up for voip numbers; getting a thousand real Verizon numbers is much harder.) And Venmo had a strong financial incentive to ban signups that look like bots and scammers.
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.
The transience bit is going to become a huge problem over the next decade. I've personally had 3 phone numbers since college (an out-of-state # doesn't mesh well with my career and I've moved several times) and at least one of the individuals who picked up one of my old numbers is the kind of person who has potential for serious run-ins with the law. My mother called my old # once and I guess it was auctioned to company that has a big market in prepaid "burner" phones. In the era of "Big Data" I can't even begin to imagine the sort of hilarious comedy (sarcasm) that can result from the two of us being linked together by what has become a primary source of personal identification.
I'm not the above poster, but I also use voip.ms. I don't think you'd need any software at all to set up a phone number with voicemail that mails the recordings. If you want to place calls from your provisioned phone number, you'd of course need either a VoIP phone, VoIP software on your computer or mobile, or rely on DISA (dialing in to voip.ms's system then entering a number to dial).
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.)
They have a configurable out-of-the-box voicemail setup option.
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.
Yep, I've been doing this for years. Only my wife and a few trusted friends have the real cell phone. Everyone else and their mother gets the GVoice number. I also change the underlying number occasionally just to mix it up even more (although truth be told that's to get better wireless deals, but it has a nice bonus of added security).
Google voice used to work fine, but I've found increasingly a number of the more "serious" institutions like banks have been rejecting VoIP numbers like Google Voice occasionally. If I can recall correctly I also believe that many of the chat applications reject numbers that are not tied directly to a SIM as well. I have used my GV since it was still invite only and have had to give out my real number increasingly often.
But if you ask a telco to give you data on a number that Google Voice administers, would the telco be able to fulfill that request? I mean, obviously they could with a little digging, but would their middlemen be able to?
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".
I started doing something like this (but with a different provider) and I noticed this is surprisingly difficult:
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.
They make much more money using it for their own products. Data is Google's core competitive advantage; you don't sell your core competitive advantage to competitors.
I think the logical outcome is rather than Google avoiding ethically dubious, but highly profitable behavior, they will simply run a tighter ship of classification, isolation, and control. Companies and governments have become pretty decent at fingering over-eager leakers. And that's before you even get into who we're talking about. Google may rival even the NSA at this point in terms of the reach and breadth of their digital surveillance and data collection/categorization capacities, at least in the Western world. They're going to learn from and work against their leaks, not give up their 'ambitions'.
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...
As we seen with the Google Plus bug that exposed user data even if Google would be a nice company even they can have a bug and expose your data, this makes me think that the best solution as a user is minimize the data that is collected about you and as a company to discard any data that you don't need and anonymize the data you have to keep and can be anonymized.
Reason #1 sort of invalidates Reason #2. If Google is reasonably confident that they have an unmatchable (in the short term) advantage in interpreting and monetizing your data and can also generate additional revenue by selling it to firms that can't extract the same value from it, what incentive is stopping them? If competitors start to catch up in the areas jn which they have the clear advantage, they can simply shut off the faucet and the revenue generated by selling information jn the here and now helps fund initiatives to keep them ahead in the first place.
If it's just a voicemail box it doesn't have your location data to leak, although a DID onto a voicemail box (and maybe a SIP trunk if you really want it) is better.
All you're doing is moving that from T-Mobile/AT&T/Verizon to Google, who will sell the information at the drop of a hat for the exact same reason. You're not guaranteeing anything at all. In fact you're probably making yourself less safe as Google is going to have less protections than a cell phone company.
This is completely incorrect. Google/Facebook/etc actually have far better data privacy than the telecoms. Google/Facebook/etc all sell access to target you using the data they know about you. Telecoms literally sell your data. There's a big difference.
Facebook does not sell your data. Facebook licensed data for very specific use cases (e.g. allowing feature phone developers to create feature phone FB apps, allowing individual apps to access data with your permission) but in both of those cases (all the NYT cases about FB data privacy in-fact) they did not get paid.
