I have the opportunity to upgrade my phone to a new iPhone 16 Pro while keeping the old one with me. Because of this, I have considered changing my phone number and keeping the old one active for a few months on my current phone.
Why change the phone number?
I have, practically, never changed my phone number simply because I’m lazy and because of the fear of missing something important when the current phone number is finally disabled.
But after so much time using the internet, my current phone number is, literally, on hundreds of websites, and hundreds of people have it. They might not even remember who I am, but phone numbers take up so little space on your phone that you could store a million of them without even noticing. This means there are a lot of people I haven’t talked to in years who still have my number sitting there, idle.
And that’s the main problem. With so many people and websites having my number, any “secret” will eventually get exposed to the internet faster than you might think. Then, scammers and other bad actors could use it for phishing attempts or simply to spam me.
The Robinson List
When talking to people about this problem, something that almost immediately came to their minds was this list. For those who might not know about it, here is a small description:
The Robinson List Service allows you, easily and for free, to avoid advertising from companies to which you have not given your consent to send you advertisements. It works for advertising via phone, postal mail, email, and SMS/MMS.
Sounds like a great service, doesn’t it? Well, the first problem with this service is that it is enforced, but being a Spanish entity, bad actors in other countries will simply ignore it or, more realistically, not even know that it is enforced for people in Spain.
The second biggest problem is that… this is not a silver bullet. Even if everyone knew about this list, people within Spain can still call you if they have your number, and there’s nothing you can do except report them. And if that person gets “corrected,” great! But there are still plenty of bad actors in the world just a phone number away, ready to call or send you a phishing SMS.
And the third problem is that this is just a patch for a bigger issue. Not only should you be on the list by default (with the option to enable your number for these companies), but also, the legal process is the slowest and most expensive way to deal with this reality.
Why I won’t change it yet
As mentioned before, changing your phone number while keeping your information updated for the people you care about the most, as well as official government and medical entities, is a big enough task that you should be sure you really want to do it.
In my case, although I would love to do this and forget about spam calls and all that, the reality is that it only takes one person I give the new phone number to have malware on their phone, and then all this effort would be for nothing.
So, this is really only worth it in extreme cases, like if my phone number were leaked on a massive platform or if I had an actual stalker.
Having more than one phone number
Another idea I have been juggling is having more than one phone number. Think about it: I will have my older phone, and phone numbers with low internet bandwidth cost around 5€/month, so it’s a perfectly reasonable option to separate personal and “business” contacts.
But the problem is the same as before—no matter where I introduce the phone number, just one compromised website, phone, or bad actor, and the number will be in the wild forever 😭
My vision for better ways to communicate
Now that I have explained why I won’t change my phone number, I can move on to explaining my vision for a better process that minimizes all these issues. But… this post is getting long, so I will create a separate post focused solely on that.
Managing expectations: It won’t be anything groundbreaking, just some thoughts collected and presented because I want to get them out of my head and forget about them.