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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

#51

Post by crackercrews »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #49
crackercrews wrote: post #29

> Each month you will receive up to 50 minutes for incoming calls and 75 text messages. All phone number masking plans will include unlimited email masking. The cost is $3.99 a month for an annual plan or $4.99 a month for a monthly plan. So you pay $4-5 per month and you're still limited? I was expecting there would be some free amount and after that it's paid. Will this SMS work for account verification?

Google Voice numbers are reported as landlines, there seems to be some way to verify that a number is actually mobile. Very likely that Mozilla's report as landline. Banks (capital one) have definitely balked at my google voice number. What these burner numbers are great for are rewards programs. I sign up for every one I can with my GV number!

I'd be very interested to know if they work for SMS-only applications. I guess it's only $5 to try and find out. If anyone has tried, please report back!

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

#52

Post by tailspin2019 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #11
tailspin2019 wrote: post #2

This is cool. I've recently been thinking about getting a "burner" number for sharing outside my immediate circle. Same for email - the idea would be to have a phone/email for public consumption and then a separate address and number for my inner circle of family/friends.

Not worth it. I have a Google Voice number (free, easy, good UX). Now it’s a constant juggle of “which number did I give”. Especially since you presumably have already given away your current number. Even if you go all-in on burner number, there’s a question of longevity and risk. Do you give it to government? Do you give it to banks? Etc

Yeah, very good points. I hadn't thought of the "which number did I give" complication.

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

#53

Post by tailspin2019 »

nicholasjarnold wrote: post #7
tailspin2019 wrote: post #2

This is cool. I've recently been thinking about getting a "burner" number for sharing outside my immediate circle. Same for email - the idea would be to have a phone/email for public consumption and then a separate address and number for my inner circle of family/friends.

Same. Though for email there are good services like Fastmail (and likely many others) which already offer this and other benefits for a nominal subscription fee. I haven't implemented this idea yet, but what stops us from just buying Twilio credits, getting a number through them and then writing a bit of glue code to their API to pull down SMS messages (for things like 2-factor codes, etc) and route them wherever we…

> what stops us from just buying Twilio credits, getting a number through them

I was considering exactly this, or potentially getting a second mobile number via eSIM on my phone (which feels a bit more "permanent" but that might be delusion...)

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

#54

Post by groovecoder »

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.

Yeah, "Bring your own domain" is a super cool feature idea. We could even re-use Acme HTTP-01 or DNS-01 challenges to verify the domain.

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

#55

Post by groovecoder »

ratata wrote: post #48
groovecoder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Great to hear! One suggestion; I think it would be great to have an integration with smartphones Contact apps. This way a user can leverage autocomplete and do not disturb rules on mobile.

Oh interesting. Do you mind filing an issue for what you have in mind here?

https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay/issues/new

FWIW, when you get a Relay number, we text you a contact card for it, so you can save it into your phone's contacts app.

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

#56

Post by mdasen »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #49
crackercrews wrote: post #29

> Each month you will receive up to 50 minutes for incoming calls and 75 text messages. All phone number masking plans will include unlimited email masking. The cost is $3.99 a month for an annual plan or $4.99 a month for a monthly plan. So you pay $4-5 per month and you're still limited? I was expecting there would be some free amount and after that it's paid. Will this SMS work for account verification?

Google Voice numbers are reported as landlines, there seems to be some way to verify that a number is actually mobile. Very likely that Mozilla's report as landline. Banks (capital one) have definitely balked at my google voice number. What these burner numbers are great for are rewards programs. I sign up for every one I can with my GV number!

When I look up my Google Voice number, it shows up as VoIP (not quite landline) with the carrier being Grand Central - SVR. It seems likely that Mozilla's service will similarly show up as VoIP. Some places are filtering VoIP numbers from their SMS verification schemes, but most places will let you sign up for promotional texts from a VoIP number.

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

#57

Post by sitzkrieg »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #49
crackercrews wrote: post #29

> Each month you will receive up to 50 minutes for incoming calls and 75 text messages. All phone number masking plans will include unlimited email masking. The cost is $3.99 a month for an annual plan or $4.99 a month for a monthly plan. So you pay $4-5 per month and you're still limited? I was expecting there would be some free amount and after that it's paid. Will this SMS work for account verification?

Google Voice numbers are reported as landlines, there seems to be some way to verify that a number is actually mobile. Very likely that Mozilla's report as landline. Banks (capital one) have definitely balked at my google voice number. What these burner numbers are great for are rewards programs. I sign up for every one I can with my GV number!

google voice numbers are identified as the voip number they are (bandwidth dot com etc) and virtually nothing takes them for identification

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

#58

Post by janalsncm »

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…

That was my thought. Unless I can create multiple numbers and disable them at will, this is quite flawed.

With a virtual cc number, I create a new number on demand for each service I need, and disable it after I don’t need it anymore.

With virtual email addresses, I create a virtual address and delete it after I don’t need it anymore.

Unless there is a phone number analog, a single number is only useful until that number is compromised. Which could be day 1.

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

#59

Post by groovecoder »

moxieta wrote: post #36
politelemon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I assume this means you have an MX record at example.com pointing to your/mailbox.org SMTP server? AIUI, a sending MTA will look up the MX record for example.com by preference order and will deliver emails to the first server that accepts the connection.

So it may depend if you can configure your mailbox.org account/server to reject connections from servers trying to send mail to unknown addresses? Then the sending MTA server might "fail over" to the Relay server instead?

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

#60

Post by Zak »

lalopalota wrote: post #18
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…

If you get a spam call / text, you can block that number from calling / texting you again. I can already do that on my phone, and it is kind of useless due to caller-id spoofing that most robocallers use. Also, probably wont work for services that require a phone number but don't accept VOIP numbers. I wish the article addressed these issues.

> Also, probably wont work for services that require a phone number but don't accept VOIP numbers.

I'm running into an increasing number of these, and it's annoying because I use Google Voice as my primary phone number. Using VOIP is important for me because I travel frequently between the US and EU.

Aside from being inconvenient for me, I take blocking VOIP as a red flag that the service might want to misuse my phone number.

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