Text Number: Phone Text for Now

Your main phone number has quietly become an identity document. It is attached to your bank, your social accounts, your delivery addresses and password resets. Handing it to a stranger from a classified advert, a dating app or a shop that wants it for a loyalty card carries a risk that had nothing to do with phone numbers twenty years ago. Text Number gives you a second line to hand out instead. You pick a number from a pool of more than ten million local options, and from then on that number handles the contacts you would rather keep at arm's length. Calls and texts both work on it, so the number stands up to normal use rather than collapsing the moment someone tries to ring you. People use it for work contacts they do not want reaching their personal phone at midnight, for selling items online, for dating before trust is established, and for online shopping where a number is required but not welcome afterwards. If a number attracts too much unwanted contact, the point of a second line is that it can be abandoned without disrupting anything real. Both numbers live on one device, so there is no second phone, no second SIM and no roaming charges to worry about while travelling.