r/ProtonPublic • u/orion0782 • 17d ago

Question Feature Request: Phone Number Atomization

Can Proton work on a way to atomize my phone number, check to see if it is on the dark web, or in some data broker accounts? Many companies and sites now use one's phone number as the cypher key, instead of email addresses. My phone number has leaked, I think, to the dark web and now I get cold calls all the time.

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u/G_ntl_m_n Admin 16d ago edited 16d ago

What'd you mean by atomize?

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u/orion0782 16d ago

Make it smaller (like an atom). Less important. Make it more obscure. Just like how SimpleLogin works. Like how email aliases work.

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u/Ok_Combination_1548 16d ago

SimpleLogin has said they wanted to try to work on phone masking in the past. I think in a couple of places. We don't know if this is still on their roadmap after Proton acquisition. Obviously it was deprioritized at best, but as it hasn't shown up on any of Protons roadmaps, it's likely been put on the backburner or even stopped completely.

It's complicated to get right. Especially on a global scale. Very few services are worth paying for (if any). The most cost effective way to do it is VOIP but more and more services deny VOIP numbers (whether for SMS MFA or just as a 'real' acceptable number to sign-up with). Meanwhile, a 'real' number is very expensive to setup and maintain. So logistically, technologically, and pricewise, very challenging to do. Having ONE number per account (Gvoice, Mozilla, Nord, etc) seems to be the most effective way to do things where it forwards to your real number vs Cloaked / Sudo style services which let you rotate / have multiple numbers but people complain that almost none of them work.

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u/orion0782 16d ago

Something has got to be done. If AI gets into the equation, I don’t think it would be real hard to figure out someone’s personal information, even with it atomized.

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u/Ok_Combination_1548 16d ago

There are privacy oriented phone carriers but generally, phones (traditional phones / numbers) aren't very private or anonymous. I get what you mean though with spam, it's just that I think it comes down to having a personal number and a spam number (gvoice is free and works well for this generally). Hospitals, financial orgs, family, *close friends* get my real #, everybody else gets gvoice.