Disposable Phone Numbers?

Moshe Yudkowsky has a briliant idea regarding email addresses that extends to phone numbers: disposability. I haven’t quite gone as far as he has with email addresses, but I’ve been sketching out a “virtual email” system that could accomplish the same thing, and be used by anyone on any domain, via my web service. The intent is to be able to hand out custom email addresses to each new contact, and if they abuse it, it’s disabled.

Well Moshe is thinking the same thing for phone numbers, and Internet telephony actually has the structure to allow such use. He’s worked up a “Disposable Phone Numbers” demo using CCXML, VoiceXML, and Java. Not only would such a set up handle virtual VoIP mailboxes and person/ customer-specific extensions for CRM (Customer Relationship Management), it could be tweaked to filter out vishing attacks. (In other words, they don’t have to be disposable numbers for legit customers)

The only drawback I see is that for the integrity of purpose, you could not then advertise any of your VoIP numbers on the Internet and expect to be able to filter out calls – since someone who employs a soft interface to spam your VoIP system will likely try numerous extensions systematically, if they don’t get through to one. But his idea could be the start of a means to combat vishing attacks.

[via O'Reilly Net]