On a whim, I recently watched Henry’s video on why he ditched custom Android ROMs and saw him mentioning MySudo. I had never heard of it before and after quickly checking it out, I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this product before. Its all-in-one privacy suite is pretty ambitious and although I do use separate services for almost all of its offerings (masked e-mail, virtual cards, pseudonyms), the phone number is particularly useful. The ability to sandbox browsing data to different Sudos is also cool.
My question is this: Is it worth paying extra to have more than one masked phone number? I already use different services to ensure I don’t give out my real name,e-mail, and payment info like I stated before but unlike emails or virtual cards, phone numbers are a lot more scarce (probably why they only offer a max of 9). As such, is it sufficient to just have one or is there any real benefit in getting more?
If you give out a Sudo number to places you don’t want with your phone number (ex. department stores, royalty cards, Craigslist, useless places), you will get spam and marketing texts/calls only to your Sudo number.
You can give out your real, personal phone number to friends, family, and banks, so you only receive important communication on that number.
I have my T-Mobile number for places/people I actually want to receive calls/texts from. And I have a Google Voice number to give out to places who will send me spam calls/texts. This way my primary phone isn’t being bombarded with marketing content.
Sorry, I think I needed to be more clear. I wasn’t asking about the extra benefits of having multiple phone numbers in general but rather the benefits, if any, of having multiple masked phone numbers.
In other words, right now my plan would be to give my real phone number to friends, family, and banks just like you mentioned but then give my Sudo number to basically everybody else. I was wondering if that arrangement is sufficient or if there’s a benefit in getting more masked phone numbers and then giving a different masked phone number to different groups of websites/apps for example.
Depends on where you give out your Sudo numbers. Here’s the benefit: it will be harder for data brokers and companies to link your identity based on phone number.
For example: you give a different phone number to Google, Facebook, and your bank, it will be harder for them to link your identity and combine all the data they have about you to build an ad profile. But I bet those companies have other ways to link identities, like using email addresses.
For me, that benefit isn’t enough to consider paying for masked phone numbers. But hey, I’m not part of the data broker system yet, I’m still a teenager and always want to be one.
I think it’s very valuable if you can get away from data brokers, but not sure if having masked phone numbers is enough. You still have other pieces of data like email, physical address, and name, which can be used to link your data across companies.
Sure, it’s not enough on its own, but if you don’t use masked numbers then you can’t prevent it at all. If you use masked numbers in addition to email aliasing and different names, etc., you can certainly prevent this sort of correlation.
True, so now it depends on where you’re giving your information to. Some places, you have to give over your real address, full name, SSN, and correct date of birth, and much more information. Those pieces of information, you can’t alias or fake (legally). And they can be used to correlate your data, especially data from banks, insurance companies, healthcare companies, who are notorious for feeding into data brokers
I don’t think it’s realistic to prevent some industries, like banking especially, from correlating your accounts for a variety of reasons. For most people it’s more critical that those industries which are tied to your real-life identity aren’t able to correlate that profile with your other online/shopping/spending activities. My insurance company and my bank don’t need to know what I’m buying or eating or whatever, which is where using services like Privacy.com and MySudo and SimpleLogin with the latter comes into play.
It’s not the bank or insurance company whose profiling you. It’s the data brokerage companies who collect all this information and use it to build a profile on you. Ad companies as well.
That isn’t the point, the point is that those accounts tied to you should not be linked to accounts that don’t have to be tied to you, but I also disagree with your assessment: You’d be surprised. Banks and especially insurance companies are highly motivated to collect and track all of this information.
Thanks for the thoughts, guys! I think I’ll stick with one masked phone number for now and transfer all non-essential apps & services that require my phone number to to it. I’ll see how that works for a bit and experiment with multiple masked numbers later.
Yes but for MySudo, they stated that purchasing additional numbers won’t increase the max limit of numbers for your account. I have the plan which limits me to 1 so I can’t buy another without upgrading my plan in the future.
You get one free number with go, 3 with pro and 9 with max. Additional phone numbers can be purchased for $0.99. Three numbers, pro plan, seems to be the sweet spot, I think.
And yes! They won’t let you use more than one number on the Go plan. Go plan restricts you to only 1 number at any time. However, if you want to replace/exchange/reset this number with another new number, there is a one-time charge of 0.99. I hope this clarifies a little.