Phone number privacy is gone. What about mobile? Forget it. Government ID required. But what’s worse, your identity is obvious anyway because your location is tracked 24-7 and every text you send or receive is kept. It’s the law. The problem, folks, is the term KYC. Know Your Customer. Meaning, Government ID. Once you create a phone line that is attached to a government ID, then you’re automatically in a database and your phone is listed and attached to all the history of that phone number. Did you suddenly not care about a little privacy? Do you have to explain to anyone why you don’t particularly want to be listed anywhere? Or have every call and text tracked? This got even more complicated when most internet platforms demanded a phone number for two-factor authentication.

Then they built their own phone books from the extracted contact list. But the whole phone number ecosystem became completely public. So a couple of years ago, I got fed up and started hunting for the modern version of that old, unlisted number. I wanted something that my mom could call, my friends could call, that would never change, but that nobody else could look up. I came up with nothing, at least not a permanent line. Fortunately, I’m a software developer, so I found a way to hook up to a carrier directly and create this service myself. And last year I completed it.

It’s called Brac’s Virtual Phone. It’s a real US or Canadian number, born unlisted, no ID ever asked, unlimited for roughly what most people pay in two to three months to Verizon or Spectrum. And the unique thing is that it has SMS. Stick around and I’ll walk you through exactly what it is, why nothing else quite does the same job and how dead simple it is to set up. No hype, just the facts. Stay right there. Why care about the unlisted number? First, real quick, why do normal people even care about this in 2026? It’s not just a privacy crowd thing.

You donate $25 to a political campaign and suddenly your home address is on a public list that anybody can download. You break up with someone and they pay $1.95 to a people’s search site and have your new apartment number in 30 seconds. You hand your 13-year-old their first phone and realize every step they take is stored forever in a Google or Apple database. Google even gives this database a name, the Google Sensor Vault, and is the main source of geolocation in many court cases. You post a political opinion on some internet site and someone easily looks up who made that post using your phone number.

It’s the exact same reason regular families paid for unlisted numbers in the 90s. The only thing that changed is the default flip from private to public and nobody asked our permission. Why make us feel that this is illegal? What I’ve described is just what the average person understands as the problem with a public number. But it’s worse. There’s a law called the CALEA law that requires carriers to share historical records of calls and text to government agencies. And now every single call and text is quickly available with an identity. And that data resides not just in an FBI database but kept long-term in carrier databases as well.

Since the phone system is public, the only real protection left is a little anonymity, meaning we just want the phone number and related history not to be directly tied to our name. Yeah, it’s a law and directly derived from the Patriot Act that enabled the extreme surveillance that follows our every move. It’s creepy and it’s uncomfortable. And as a law abiding citizen, just living a normal life, I don’t like someone spying on my every move. And you know, there’s a lot of spying on your mobile devices, but really the start of all this is the phone and the phone number.

It’s hard to feel free when you feel that someone is watching you. A single number is not sustainable. Though you already intuitively understand that having an unlisted number is important, you will also see that this new environment uses the phone number as the de facto ID. So having an extra unlisted line is your only option in many cases. Could you navigate government requirements, banks, credit without a publicly known phone number? Probably very difficult because as I said, it is more than a phone number. It is an ID. So an unlisted number becomes the alternative to use when you don’t want to show ID.

Today’s phone options. So let’s look at the four phone options almost everyone ends up with today. Option one. What the big carers still call a landline. Spectrum voice, Xfinity voice, Verizon FiOS, digital voice, AT&T phone, whatever. They’re not copper anymore. They’re all voice over IP running over your cable or fiber. 20 to 60 bucks a month full ID and billing address required. And every single one is automatically listed online that day is activated. Most don’t even give you texting. Option two, normal mobile plans, real government ID, constant location pinging, text stored for years, 40 to 80 bucks a month per line.

You know the deal. Option three, the free or cheap voice over IP apps, text now, text plus, Google voice, hush burner, all those. Super convenient until you read the fine print. Almost all of them require a real phone number to sign up or to recover the account. That’s a backdoor. And some will recycle the number if you go quietly for 90 days, for example, with Google voice. This should be quite obvious with Google voice, for example, that it is tied to all the Google ID tracking on the internet. Option four, the business class services, RingCentral, Nextiva, Vonage Business, 8×8.

They’re rock solid, but they’re priced for companies and they still want your name, address, and tax ID. I tried everything. Nothing felt like the old, unlisted landline. A permanent number your close people know, but invisible to the rest of the planet. So here’s what we ended up building. Brac’s virtual phone is basically the 2026 version of the unlisted landline. Real US or Canadian phone number. Never sent to the public listing databases. It’s born unlisted and stays that way forever. We literally never ask for a government ID, name, or address. We can’t accept it even if you try.

You pay once a year. We accept various methods of payment and are quite flexible. Plans are stupidly simple. 75 a year, gets you a thousand minutes and a thousand texts. 120 a year, unlimited calling, limited texting. $180 a year, unlimited calling and texting. Or if you just want to kick the tires, pay some partial period that will prorate it. Month by month if you want. That’s it. No starter plan, no plus plan, no add-ons, no surprises. How it is used. Now, how do people actually use it day to day? Two main ways. Way number one, what most people do is bring back the home phone setup.

A lot of us miss having real handsets scattered around the house. The easiest is a grand stream cordless system. One little base station plugs into your router and you get up to five wireless handsets in the kitchen, the bedroom, office, wherever. This is what it looks like. This is a new device and easily found on Amazon. They look and feel exactly like the cordless phones we grew up with. If you don’t want any radio signals at all, they make a fully wired desk phone version. Just an ethernet cable and power, zero RF and it looks like this.

Plug it in, turn it on and it rings like 1995 again. We can pre-program the thing and ship it to you ready to go if you don’t want to touch a single setting. Otherwise, you can do it yourself. All you need is to enter login credentials to the device. Way number two is soft phone on a laptop, tablet, or even your existing cell phone. There are free apps, MicroSip on Windows, Sipnetic and VoIP-MS on Android, Linphone on Mac, Linux or Android. You log in, put on a headset or use the built-in mic and you’re good. Perfect for travel or if you don’t want extra hardware.

Now, these aren’t as reliable for receiving calls as the landline versions, but I like them for secondary use when you’re on the road. If you’re on the road, how do you get voicemail from your private line? Easy. Let’s assume you have a normal mobile phone line that is your public number. From that, you can receive voicemail via email. This way you can get alerted when you have a message. Then you can use your soft phone app to call back. Or another option is just forward the call to your mobile number. To the caller, there’s no indication that it’s been forwarded.

So even though you answered on a different phone number, the caller only knows the private number. This way you’re always reachable on the private number even when you’re traveling. So if you’re going away for a vacation for a week, you can forward the number temporarily and then remove the forwarding when you get back so you can use the landline again. Okay, the big question everybody asks, what about texting and 2FA? Traditional SIP phones don’t do SMS. That’s always been the missing piece. We fixed it with the dead simple web portal we call My SMS.

You just go to Braxme in any browser, phone, laptop, tablet, whatever, and your texts are sitting there on your My SMS page. Send, receive, pictures, the whole thing. If you only get occasional texts like bank 2FA codes, you can have them forwarded straight to your email for free. You can also forward text to another number, but it’s better to just use email to keep it out of the surveillance databases. Some soft phone apps, notably VoIP-MS soft phones, seems to handle SMS pretty well. But the problem with most soft phone apps is that if they lose an internet connection, then you lose the message.

My SMS is 100% accurate all the time. You will never miss an SMS. 2 Factor Authentication Actually, this was an important rivalry in my creating the Brax virtual phone solution. Your phone number is publicly known even more because of the rampant use of a mobile phone number as your ID card on the internet, often referred to as 2 Factor Authentication. First required by Facebook, then by Google, and now it is expected that you get to reveal your phone number to any platform just to sign up. Then these companies read the contact list of their users and then match you all up so they know who’s connected to who.

So basically, the big players build their own phone books and can organize it by connections. Facebook is the worst since you publicly state your relationships on there. Because of this, their version of the phone book is ultra creepy. Because of the abuse of phone number collection via this 2FA, I’d rather not give out a private number to these sites. Now, I can’t control which companies will accept 2FA from a voiceover IP line, but a good number of them will. Sometimes it may require a call to the company to allow you to use a voiceover IP line, but just tell them it’s your landline with texting.

For example, I have no reason to give my real phone number to companies like Amazon, eBay, or any social media site. I have an older video that has a more intense approach to hiding phone numbers, and I’ll link it in the description. But to do that successfully, you need multiple numbers. Emergency calling. Emergency calling. Let’s talk about 911 because I don’t want to gloss over it. It’s completely optional. If you want the number officially registered for E911, it’s an extra 2 bucks a month, and yes, we do a real address for that one single thing.

Most people just keep a 10-year-old smartphone with no SIM in a kitchen drawer. Any phone, even with no services, can dial 911, and the cell towers will locate it. It costs nothing and works perfectly. But I’m not going to force you to give your name and address to have E911. A couple of smaller details while I’m thinking of them. Robocalls basically disappear because the number has never been in a single campaign database or data broker list. You still get the occasional wrong number, but that’s it. If you’re the type who runs a VPN 24-7, it works fine.

We’ve got plenty of users doing exactly that. The cost. Let’s talk money for a few seconds because I know that’s on your mind. $180 a year for unlimited everything is $15 a month. $120 a year unlimited calling with limited text is $10 a month. That’s less than half of what most landline services charge, and they still list you publicly and give you zero texting. I’m not here to tell you it’s the cheapest thing on earth. There are free options, but nothing else gives you this exact combination of permanent, unlisted, no ID, real SMS, works with banks.

So that’s the whole story. If you’ve been looking for something that feels like the old unlisted landline, a number your friends and family can always reach, but that never changes. But that draws a complete blank for data brokers, scammers, big tech social media, and people search sites. This is what I’ve been running in my own house for the last couple of years. Everything’s over at the Braxme store and look for Brax virtual phone. You can read all the details, poke around, pick an area code, and be alive in literally a few minutes.

Again, no personal info required. Hey, if you’re serious about privacy, come join us at Braxme. It’s a growing community where real privacy people hang out. No censorship, no nonsense. While you’re there, check out the tools we actually built and use ourselves. Braxmail, unlimited aliases, no IP leaks. Brax virtual phone, real anonymous numbers. Bites VPN, no logs, no big corporate BS. The Google phones and more in the store. The Brax 3 phone second batch is open for pre-order right now at Braxtech.net. First batch sold shortly after release. Big thanks to everyone supporting us on Patreon, locals, and YouTube memberships.

You keep this channel alive. See you next time. [tr:trw].

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