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Ask HN: Is there a temp phone number like temp email?

10 points by piratesAndSons ↗ HN
A service where you pay $5 per month, and in exchange, you get a temporary phone number to provide to websites and apps that require phone number verification. This helps cut down on spam, since many of these websites and apps resell your phone number immediately.

I don’t see why this would be illegal, since you still retain the identity of the subscriber.

13 comments

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JohnFen
In the US, you can approximate this with a cheap prepaid service like a Tracfone.
dabinat
There are apps like Hushed where you can generate a working phone number for a pre-determined period of time.
ricardonunez
I use google voice, and in the past other virtual phone numbers but many services don’t fully work. When you request a code, you never receive it and in some cases they tell you they don’t accept the virtual number.
fragmede
I've always wondered what it would take to be my own telephone company and get an entire prefix, so I can give out unique phone numbers, kinda like how's privacy.com does for credit cards.
dredmorbius
I've been thinking through possible next steps for telephony as PSTN dies its slow death under spam.

Controlling a VOIP system, in which callers are challenged in different ways, is one approach. One potential challenge would be to issue random, non-sequential, and sparsely populated "extension" numbers, of say 10--20 digits (10 billion -- 100 quintillion values).

You'd offer a distinct value to each individual contact. Those contacts would be permitted to contact only that "extension". This creates a 1:1 pairing of caller to permitted contact number.

Coordinating generation and acceptance is probably the most challenging piece of this. Callers who might attempt contacts from multiple number is another.

(Which itself suggests assigning an extention to a set or range of numbers, e.g., a healthcare network, school or university system, or large business / organisation with which you engage frequently.)

Friends-and-family would have an easier challenge (whitelisted numbers, some in- or out-of-band validation, or simply being requested to enter the last four digits of their own number (robocall spoofs would probably fail that for at least some time.

Effectively, your single public "published" number serves as a gateway to your own telephony network, into which you can establish both valid numbers, restrictions on same, and challenges, as you see fit.

fragmede
For humans you want to be able to call you, and you are in control of the PBX receiving the call, and the contact card you are giving them, you can give each person a custom extension, and then preprogram that extension into the contact card/phone number you give them, using a comma to add a delay.
dredmorbius
Yes, exactly, and I'm aware of that. Your comment should be helpful to others and is appreciated on that count.
potamic
The numbers would quickly be blacklisted by websites. You need a very large pool of numbers and make sure you don't reuse numbers too often. Not sure if it's practical.
packtreefly
They exist. Services treat control of the number as equivalent to control of the account, and expect you to maintain that control.

Throwaway phone numbers are not a viable low cost or no cost alternative in most normal user signup scenarios, and they're implemented as a privacy invasive form of spam prevention for that exact reason.