Mark Brooks notes that a safety expert is urging consumer to use a new phone service, MyPrivateLine.com, that provides a safe, private way to receive phone calls while protecting the identity of your real phone number. The press release says that the newest online directories include cell phone numbers, not just landlines. Can anyone verify this with an example?
FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, which is how these companies make their bank.
Mark neglected to mention that while calls are $.15 cents per minute, calls to check voice mail are also billed at 10¢ (US$) per minute. I can imagine MyPrivateLine customer service reps using a free VOIP system to leave messages in unsuspecting customer’s voicemail boxes, forcing them to spend a buck a pop to answer spam voicemail. That’s a nice little side business, like the people who are hired to click on Eharmony Google ad links all day for cash.
More competition for G*Number. They came out of the gate a few months ago but all has been quiet since then. I liked that messages came into you email box as MP3 files, no charge to retrieve messages. Plus, and this is my own idea, you could create an RSS enclosure and subscribe to you calls in iTunes just like I subscribe to my “dating feed” from Consumating in Bloglines. I’m scraping all my Yahoo and Match emails and search results into RSS as well. Why wait for them when we can do it today. Someone go make this a standalone service please, I don’t have the time.
Lest you forget, or learn for the first time, Skype is free and can be anonymized for free, rendering these services less useful. With Gmails aliasing feature it would be very difficult to trace anyone, including terrorists. The government/FCC will step in soon enough and regulate this type of communication. Some sort of online dating Patriot Act sponsored by True perhaps?
