Craigsnumber: Free, automatically expiring phone numbers

Craigsnumber's tagline is simple and to the point: "Listing online? Protect your privacy." And that's all there is to it. Craigsnumber is a dead simple online service that will give you a disposable phone number for conducting business online. Want to provide a phone number on your eBay auction, but don't want your real number out there forever? Just go to Craigsnumber, enter your real number and when you want the disposable number to expire (one hour, one day, or one week), and you'll be assigned a Craigsnumber (which is an ordinary phone number and extension) that will forward calls to you only until it expires. When someone calls your Craigsnumber, they'll be prompted to record a greeting before they're connected, which allows you to screen incoming calls. If you want the number to be in a particular area code, you can choose from between San Francisco, Dallas, and Washington, D.C. One feature that would be nice to have is finer-grained control over expiration times. Being able to set it to 10 days or two weeks would be very welcome.

So, where's the business model? I have no idea, but it's a neat service that doesn't require any registration, another big plus for the privacy-conscious. As a big minus, however, the site doesn't appear to have any privacy policy. I've put in a query to the site's creators about that, and will update this post if they reply.

Update: The Craigsnumber folks e-mailed me to let me know that you can see the privacy policy by mousing over the asterisk next to the field where you enter your phone number. It says: "We do not sell, rent, or lease your phone number to third parties. Any companies or individuals employed by us are bound by law to protect the confidentiality of your information." Since my original post Craigsnumber has also added an FAQ that addresses privacy.

Tags: craigsnumber, disposable, expire, phone, phone number, privacy