YOUR PERSONAL NUMBER The next app that asks does not need your number.

A phone number is the one identifier you cannot rotate. An email can be aliased and a password changed in a minute, but the number you have carried for years is the same one your bank uses to reach you, and it is now held by every service that ever asked for a one-time code. Each of those services can be breached, sold, or scraped, and when one is, the number is what links the pieces back to you.

This is for anyone who has looked at a signup form, wondered why an app needs a phone number, and typed it in anyway. That is most people, and it is the reason this service exists.

Where the number goes after you type it

Into the service, first, and then into the things attached to the service. Contact syncing on someone else's phone means your number sits in their address book backups whether or not you ever spoke. Data brokers buy and merge these lists. Recovery flows hang off the number, so whoever controls it can reset accounts you forgot were tied to it.

None of that requires the service to do anything wrong. It is the ordinary consequence of a permanent identifier being handed to dozens of parties, each with its own retention policy and its own breach one day.

What changes when you rent one instead

The service gets a real mobile number and sends its code. You read the code, finish the signup, and the number returns to the pool. The account works exactly as it would have. What the service does not get is the line that reaches you, and what the data brokers do not get is another record with your name on it.

Set recovery on an email and password you control, and put two-factor in an authenticator app rather than SMS. Then the account never depends on a number at all, which is the state every account should be in.

Where it stops

Keeping your personal number private is the whole point of this. Pretending to be someone else, or coming back to a platform that lawfully removed you, is not, and our acceptable use policy says so plainly.