Hide My Email works as a proxy for e-mails, and I really like it, but moreso for privacy than spam. If you have my e-mail address, then you have a means to con

Hide My Email works as a proxy for e-mails, and I really like it, but moreso for privacy than spam. If you have my e-mail address, then you have a means to contact me - even if I don’t want you to. Sure, I can block you, I can ignore you or I can trust that my spam filter will catch your e-mails, but what if you’re malicious? You can circulate my e-mail to any number of spam lists that I’ll have to receive rubbish from in perpetuity. HME works for that, but I’m still stuck giving the same phone number to everyone. Phone numbers are even worse in that I can’t just ignore a call from you (save for declining all calls from withheld or unknown numbers, at which point my phone could be likewise getting called constantly if you were maliciously circulating my details). The notion that the means by which I contact you is the same as how your friend John or cousin Sarah or even your parent/kids/spouse contacts you is insane. We have two systems where you need to arrange with everyone you know to use new details because one single person that had your details is being nasty. And you’ll have to do it all again if they find out your new ones. It’s not at all how you would design a communication system if you were to start over. Something like Hide My Phone Number would be a big help, but wouldn’t work with the existing phone network as you’d need to make far longer phone numbers than the standards support (essentially a number for Apple/Google then a routing GUID for the contact if you wanted to built it on top of the phone network). I’d like to see Apple and Google make a standard to push to replace phone numbers with something like this that can sit inside the dialer so it’ll handle it transparently as if it were a normal call.