Though we frequently talk about protecting your data online, one of the biggest challenges is the data we give away freely. From online accounts to delivery services, you’re often asked to provide your name, email address, and phone number – information that can be stolen, sold, or otherwise misused. And while we can set up spam filters on our email accounts, giving away our phone number can be very frustrating. Constant spam calls and texts can leave you ignoring the phone every time it rings, missing important calls, or falling prey to text message scams. Surfshark, one of our favorite VPN providers, now offers a new service to help protect your privacy: Alternative Number. This feature provides you with a separate phone number to use for your online accounts, reducing the need to share your personal number.
People can call or text this virtual number, and you can respond to those messages as you choose. Text messages show up in the Surfshark app, while phone calls appear like normal calls. However, you will see calls are coming via Surfshark, so you know it's a call to your alternate number. This lets you more easily filter these messages and ignore them if you aren't interested. Getting too much spam to your alternate number? You can change the number (once per month) or pause it to stop incoming calls and texts.
As someone who is regularly bombarded with text message spam, I feel that this service is a potential way to break that cycle and stop giving out my phone number to companies that don't really need it. Alternative Number is part of Surfshark's Alternative ID feature, which creates a whole alternate identity (including a name, date of birth, address, and email address) to create accounts with, so your data isn't getting spread around every time you make a new account. Emails are forwarded to your primary address, so you still get any information you need – just without exposing your personal information. With Alternative Number, you can also add a different phone number.
Read more: 3 Ways to Make Private Phone Calls
The only downside is that it’s an additional subscription fee on top of your standard Surfshark subscription. To use Alternative Number, first you need to subscribe to Surfshark (if you aren’t already a subscriber). Though month-to-month subscriptions are a bit pricey (from $15.45 to $17.95 per month depending on the subscription), 12-month plans are very reasonable for what they offer, bringing the price down to $2.79 to $5.09 per month (paid up front), with a 30-day money back guarantee. Alternative Number adds an extra $2.99 to $4.99 per month, depending on how long you’re purchasing it for. Just go to your account page to add the service to your plan.
Though that's a significant premium over the base price of the service, this is an extremely easy way to protect your phone number and regain a bit of your digital privacy. Combined with Alternative ID, you can avoid handing out a great deal of personal information so malicious actors can't get their hands on it. The fact that these features are easy to use is what makes them winners: you can get virtual phone numbers from other services, and you can make up your own fake personal information, but this streamlines the process, so it just takes a few clicks to create and add this information to new accounts. Because it's easy to use, you're much more likely to use it, which will keep you safer – and perhaps free of so many spam calls.
[Image credit: Surfshark]
Elizabeth Harper is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience covering consumer technology and entertainment. In addition to writing for Techlicious, she's Editorial Director of Blizzard Watch and is published on sites all over the web, including Time, CBS, Engadget, and DealNews.
