I’m looking for guidance on how to compartmentalize phone numbers. I currently use my current phone number for family, friends, and acquaintances, a Google Voice for financial accounts, and another Google Voice number forwarded to my number for my employer only. What I hope to achieve is to move away from Google Voice service, delist my phone number of 15 years from all the services I’ve signed up to, and organization.
From my limited research, I’ve found jmp.chat service as a replacement for Google Voice. I could, however, move my family to a more secure and private chat app but nobody in my family use the app as well as a massive battery hog without Google Play Services.
Here’s a rough draft of my setup.
New sim number: n/a
Jmp.chat main number: Family, friends, acquaintances, lovers, randos
Jmp.chat secondary number: Banks (2FA), insurance, doctor, tax, government
Jmp.chat third number: Job hunt, employer, co-workers
DaisySMS: Online services such as Uber, Amazon, eBay, etc.
Follow up questions:
What’s your take on grouping family and friends with prospective lovers, acquaintances, and randos in the same number?
What about employer, and co-workers in the same number?
I think your set-up is quite realistic, mine is quite similar.
Splitting the groups in your question 1 and 2 I would not do but that’s also because for me those groups are all interconnected so that would never work out ( I tried )
not sure. For JMP I use Snikket for calls and sms. I wish they had EU numbers as this is actually the most robust set up I have. Other solutions I use for VOIP here are quite messy.
It’s realistic and it makes sense. I suppose in theory it could be better to segregate as many groups of people in your life under different phone numbers, but doing so would drastically increase the cost and complexity and that’s probably just not worth it for most people.
This also sort of makes sense, but depending on your situation, this group might bleed into the first group of people, which might result in burdening you with unnecessary cost/complexity. But again, it really depends on your situation. If you don’t think group B will ever bleed into group A, then I’d say it could make sense to use a dedicated phone number for them.
On another note, I’m curious if JMP supports E2EE on XMPP. If they do, it might be best to stick to XMPP. Though to be fair, it’d be a fairly minor benefit since SMS/MMS isn’t encrypted to begin with. Even if they don’t, they do allow users to opt-in to Jabber ID discovery, which could allow people to establish E2EE communications via XMPP if they use something like OMEMO, so sticking with XMPP could still be of some potential security benefit. (See: Q13. Can I call or video call other JMP users for free?)
Oh how I wish for a time where E2EE on RCS is widely adopted…
