Our phone numbers have become a part of our identities, and they connect us with the wider world 24/7. It seems like everyone has our phone number these days, whether they be close friends and family or just business people who took your number down at a conference.
While the cultural importance of maintaining some privacy when it comes to your phone number is beginning to wane, there are still ways you can protect your number from unwanted parties. One of the best ways to do this is through anonymous calls.
What Is an Anonymous Call?
An anonymous call is just what it sounds like: A call that doesn’t betray your identity on another person’s caller ID. This means no phone number, no area code, no name.
Doing this allows you to contact other parties you would prefer to stay ignorant of your phone number or contact people you know without them knowing it is you making the call.
When you make an anonymous call, you protect your phone number and prevent people from calling you back, giving you a degree of privacy that has fallen to the wayside in recent years.
There are various ways to make an anonymous call, but all of them involve hiding your main phone number from the people you call.
When To Use Them
There are many reasons you might want to make an anonymous call. Maybe you want to call your brother to wish him a happy birthday without him knowing you’re going to call. Maybe you want to call a local shop without them adding your number to a registry of theirs. Maybe you need to call a client from a mobile phone, and you don’t want them to have your number.
Regardless of your motives, making anonymous calls is a widespread practice, which is why pretty much all modern mobile devices allow you to do it. You can even hide your identity and make anonymous calls on a landline.
How To Use Anonymous Calls
The easiest way to make an anonymous call is to simply type in *67 before inputting the number you want to call. Doing this will make your number appear unknown to the other party, keeping your identity a secret.
This works on both mobile phones and on landlines. Using this prefix can be done every time you make a phone call and is never any more complicated than typing that *67 every time.
You should note that you may not want to make every single call you make anonymous. While it is important to maintain your privacy, in some cases hiding your identity can cause people to pass on answering the phone.
Some people even set their phones to block any unknown numbers to keep undesirables from calling them. Just try and key into the situation to figure out if it is appropriate for an anonymous call.
Calling the auto shop would probably be fine, but a family member might be less likely to answer if they don’t know who is calling them.
Using A Burner Number
Anonymous calls are great, but they are a one-use deal, and you must use *67 on a case-by-case basis. Another great alternative that keeps your identity and phone number safe is using a burner phone.
Burner phones are secondary phones with phone numbers that you can use to separate the people you want to access your number from those you do not. When you use a burner phone, the receiving party will call an actual number, but it won’t be one they can associate with your number.
It is a different number that won’t show up as unknown, meaning people are more likely to pick up, but it also doesn’t compromise your privacy and personal information. You can use the Burner app as a burner phone.
Burner creates a second burner phone number that you tie to your existing device, meaning that you get all the practicality of a burner phone without actually having to buy a new appliance.
Conclusion
Masking our phone number has plenty of benefits, the most important being the maintenance of your privacy.
Methods of keeping our privacy sacred are getting harder and harder to come by, and using a second number with Burner to keep your phone number private is a great way to stay in control of your information.
With Burner, you can access services that require a phone number without having to give your personal information away.
Sources:
How to block your number & block Caller ID FAQs | Verizon
Site Shows Publicly Available Personal Information Based On Your Phone Number | Forbes
