With the data mining and information selling/swapping that goes on, if you give your phone number (traditional, VOIP, cellular, etc.) to the car tire fixer place [a]... it'll soon be on The List for plenty of other vendors to annoy and harass you.
And don't even think about what happens if you hand it to a political group..
[a] vendor chosen as an example, no harm intended.But there are times you pretty much have to give folk a number to reach you.
Having my own internet domains I can simply make-up an e-mail address and destroy it a month later. And there are commercial services with similar options.
But doing it with a phone number is trickier.
I was thinking of... a system/company that offers up phone numbers, and then lets you pick and choose "extensions" in it, which you could either route to your "real" number, to v-mail, or send back to oblivion when no longer needed.
For example, the company might have, among other numbers, 808-555-1000. You could get "rights to", for want of a better term, extensions "752-1000" through "752-1999", and assign them as you chose.
So getting back to that tire place where you want them to reach you, you'd activate ext. 752-1222 to call out to your real number (or go to v-mail). Two months later, when you start getting marketing garbage, you'd simply kill it off.
Anyone know of any service that has this? (And yes, I realize this would be almost practical for anyone with their own "Asterisk" system, but that requires the equipment, the set up, and oodles of upfront money, effort, and maintenance).
Thanks
_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]