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Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay

#31

Post by balderdash »

jaclaz wrote: post #5

I don't understand the idea behind it. Now: 1) You give your real number to someone. 2) Somehow your real number goes into a list used by robo-callers. 3) A robo-call arrives on your real number, disturbing your peace. After: 0) You give Mozilla 3.99 or 4.99 US$/month 1) You give your Mozilla number to someone. 2) Somehow your Mozilla number goes into a list used by robo-callers. 3) A robo-call arrives on your Mozill…

Totally agree, this should be a telephone version of a spam folder. I have a legacy google voice plan that I use for this, but would be happy to pay a couple bucks a month to Mozilla for a comparable service.

Re: Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay

#32

Post by UncleEntity »

smileysteve wrote: post #22
jaclaz wrote: post #5

I don't understand the idea behind it. Now: 1) You give your real number to someone. 2) Somehow your real number goes into a list used by robo-callers. 3) A robo-call arrives on your real number, disturbing your peace. After: 0) You give Mozilla 3.99 or 4.99 US$/month 1) You give your Mozilla number to someone. 2) Somehow your Mozilla number goes into a list used by robo-callers. 3) A robo-call arrives on your Mozill…

I effectively did this with Google Voice back when. I would give marketers my Google voice number, it had better interface (and on cloud instead on device) contact management. I could send non favorites to a voice identification prompt (voiding all slow recordings or agents making multi calls that have a pickup delay) and for the final small percentage voice transcripts that I could determine if important. Or for cra…

I still use google voice like that, give it out when I absolutely have to give a phone number (because they verify by text or whatever) but have the app set to silent.

Google does a really good job of filtering out the telemarketing calls so the rare message is usually valid.

Pretty much the only time I have to open the app is this one stupid company (coughWalmartcough) which insists on doing 2FA via text every single time I want to check the balance on my prepaid debit card.

Re: Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay

#33

Post by neogodless »

jaclaz wrote: post #5

I don't understand the idea behind it. Now: 1) You give your real number to someone. 2) Somehow your real number goes into a list used by robo-callers. 3) A robo-call arrives on your real number, disturbing your peace. After: 0) You give Mozilla 3.99 or 4.99 US$/month 1) You give your Mozilla number to someone. 2) Somehow your Mozilla number goes into a list used by robo-callers. 3) A robo-call arrives on your Mozill…

From the article

> If you find yourself receiving too many unwanted spam calls or texts, you can easily turn it off for all phone numbers or select the specific ones you want to block.

So it sounds like if your aliased phone number has issues, you can block those specific ones. In theory, you can do that now from your phone, for individual numbers, but it isn't applied if you switch devices. So it's a very moderate improvement.

Additionally, your existing phone number is probably already overwhelmingly accessible to robo-callers, i.e. the cat is already out of the bag.

Re: Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay

#34

Post by LeoPanthera »

Maybe this is a good place to ask: I'm a British expat living in the USA, and for a while now I've wanted a service which provides a British phone number, and forwards calls and texts to my US number, while also allowing me to send texts and make calls "from" the UK number if I want to.

It looks like I might be able to do this with Twilio, but I'm not a developer, and quickly got frustrated trying to build what I wanted.

Is there a service that will do this for me at a reasonable price?

Re: Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay

#36

Post by moxieta »

politelemon wrote: post #23
groovecoder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Mozilla Privacy & Security ENGR) Stay tuned ... :)

Since you're here looking, please could the relay custom domain feature support custom domains? At the moment it actually generates subdomains.

i would like this too. i think you can do it with apple email relay.

currently i have example.com as my email, which i use with mailbox.org, would it be possible to keep using it with mailbox.org and then for mozilla to allow it to be used for email relays? e.g.

name@example.com goes to mailbox.org

3859dhtog@example.com goes to firefox relay

(not currently ofc, but a future thing)

Re: Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay

#38

Post by ridgered4 »

jaclaz wrote: post #5

I don't understand the idea behind it. Now: 1) You give your real number to someone. 2) Somehow your real number goes into a list used by robo-callers. 3) A robo-call arrives on your real number, disturbing your peace. After: 0) You give Mozilla 3.99 or 4.99 US$/month 1) You give your Mozilla number to someone. 2) Somehow your Mozilla number goes into a list used by robo-callers. 3) A robo-call arrives on your Mozill…

Yeah, I'm a little confused on the use case for this. I guess I could put all of the annoying services that demand a phone number for totally-only-security purposes-trust-us into a "bucket" number. It doesn't sound like it is a feature but I'd prefer that calls and texts to that number just be outright ignored unless I've turned the number on temporarily for verification. But since they have started rejecting VOIP numbers for verification, and now even prepaid phone numbers (!) for verification I feel like this probably won't work for that either.

I personally only use prepaid cards so a service that makes them appear like post paid might be useful on its own though.

The fact that you only get one number and you can't change is seems to blunt some of the utility. Ideally you'd want a separate number for each service and to have them all turned off, to block identifying you as the same user of different services. Not quite as easy to do with finite numbers as with email address suffixes.

I wonder if you could use this like 5sim or other shady text verification services by just remaking a monthly account. I suspect that is not the idea here and probably forbidden, otherwise they'd let you change numbers.

Re: Protect your privacy and your phone number with Firefox Relay

#40

Post by jaclaz »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #30
jaclaz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 robocall…

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".
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