Prevent your cell phone number and information from being collected by blocking your phone number. Allow family and friends to identify your calls by adding a prefix to their numbers in your contacts.
Your cell phone number is one of the many items of personal information that are bought and sold via the Internet.
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse fact sheet on protecting your telephone records describes businesses that sell information related to any cell phone number you provide them, including the name and address associated with the number.
Plenty of businesses you call collect your phone number and any other caller-ID information that you provide. You have to imagine that some (most?) of those businesses are selling, trading, or otherwise using the information they collect about their customers.
That's why it makes sense not to share your caller information with every person or business you call. On the other hand, many people automatically reject calls from private numbers.
To ensure the people closest to you can identify your calls, you can override caller ID blocking by entering either *82 or *31 before the number. What's missing is a single setting that allows all the calls you make to your contacts to identify you -- and all other calls to hide your ID.
Every cell phone should come with the option to enable caller ID when you're calling a number that's listed in your contacts. Instead, caller-ID blocking is all or nothing. Even worse, the process for enabling and disabling caller ID depends on your service provider and type of phone.
CNET
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