I’m a US citizen living permanently outside the US with a need to maintain my US number. I’ve 100% degoogled my life with the exception of google voice and I’m looking to fully sever this relationship.
Does anyone have any privacy focused VoIP providers?
Bonus points - what I really actually need is a service that banks are happy to send 2FA codes too (I’m using WF and unfortunately I haven’t found a way to get them to do anything but codes via text but they won’t send codes to VOIP numbers) If this is a somehow a VOIP service WF doesn’t recognize awesome otherwise a cell phone provider would work fine too but I don’t want the standard verizon or at&t service as I don’t use any data, probably a few hundred texts per month and 30 minutes of WIFI calling.
Yeah, a lot of text 2FA providers filter to only cell company registered phone numbers, unfortunately. There’s not much you can do if your bank chooses one of those providers or explicitly asks their provider for that filtering. The text providers usually get their lists from the cell companies, so of your number isn’t on those lists, then it’s blocked if that filter is enabled.
WF typically caters more to wealthy customers and generally are behind in technology in my experience, so I doubt you’ll be able to pressure them to offer another solution if they don’t have something like email or passkey support already, but many banks do offer a physical code generator device for this purpose. And many banks offer codes or push notifications via their app for 2FA. I use GrapheneOS and some apps work for me even without Google stuff. It’s usually the big guys like WF, Chase, etc., that are behind the times.
I’m in a similar situation actually. I use MySudo for VOIP wherever I can. It’s essentially my spam number just to get codes on, but I’ve never tested it with WF specifically.
Tello and US Mobile are they best “real” number carriers I have found. $8/mo, and you can pay another service to forward all messages to your extra-US number. You’re trusting two parties for it, but I haven’t found a better way.
Cheogram is $5 + $2.50/additional # and it has a data sim option that is only metered when you use it +$5 ANNUALLY, so even if you only visit the US once a year it never wastes money
I will have to try those options too but just saying cheapest option I ever found & they’re on here too a Lemmy user recommended it actually
They have a page for checking compatibility with 2FA stuff & whether it silently bounced, maybe we should make a giant page for comparing which ones cause issues with, say, Chase (holy shit chase is so annoying they will lock you out of all online & text services if you use a VOIP number aaargh, they finally admitted they do this to every # not associated with a real name, so I assume it would work if you import your old # to Cheogram)
