GrandCentral & Telephone Privacy

I hate giving out my telephone number to people I don’t know. It’s even worse when companies like Bed, Bath & Beyond or Williams-Sonoma ask for your zip, telephone and e-mail address at the cash register. That’s an invasion of privacy. The people behind the register look at me weird when I tell them, ‘No thanks.’

However, sometimes you are required to hand over personal information. When you buy an airline ticket, a book from Amazon, or seats for a concert through Ticketmaster, they force you to give them a telephone number.

These companies claim it’s for your own good–to alert you if the flight is delayed (ha!) or to prevent credit card fraud. However, if you click through the user-agreement, buried deep in their hundreds of pages of legalese, these companies are allowed to retain, data-mine and sell your personal contact information to whomever they please.

Last week, I signed up for a free service (for now) called GrandCentral. You sign up for a local number, and use this as a ’safe’ telephone number to hand out to people. GrandCentral will forward calls from this number to your home, work and cell phone number. You can set up rules to allow certain groups of people (friends / family / work / etc) to ring through while sending everyone else straight to voicemail. If someone’s harassing you, GrandCentral will let you permanently block them or give them a sneaky, “This number is no longer in service” message.

What’s really cool is that GrandCentral added spam filtering. Based on the caller id, they will send suspicious incoming calls directly to a quarantined voicemail box. If the caller blocks his number, you can have GrandCentral act as an operator, asking the caller to identify themselves by voice. GrandCentral then calls your private telephone number and lets you decide whether or not to let the call through.

You can configure GrandCentral to send an MP3 of your voicemail to you over e-mail or just logon to the webpage to manage it similar to GMail. GrandCentral also lets you dial-in to check your voicemail if you don’t have Internet access. There are tons of other features I haven’t yet explored. One of my favorite is the “WebCall Button”. It’s an embed-able form that lets people leave you a message from your webpage.

Sign up for a GrandCentral number if you want to take control over who contacts you through the telephone. It’s currently in Beta, but it looks like they’re processing new applications for the service fairly quickly. For now, I’m treating it as a ‘throw-away’ number since I’m not sure how much the service will cost when Google finally releases it to the world.