Anonymity: 1-way or 2-way?

There seems to be growing noise (and thus confusion) around what constitutes an anonymous calling solution. Most of the noise is based around the 1-way anonymizers (meaning only that my privacy is protected when people call me on that number, but not when I call them). These are the many companies that offer consumers a number, a bridge, or a number + extension, whereby the consumer posts these private numbers or hands them out. These numbers then forward to a real number so consumers can receive calls without having to forfeit their personal privacy. When that consumer needs to call the person back, caller ID compromises the anonymity that was originally desired. Of course, more sophisticated users could presumably activate 'caller ID blocking'. Brother I've been in telecom, networking and related areas for over a decade and I couldn't tell you what the code is to activate and de-activate caller ID blocking. We've certainly learned from the several hundred folks in our closed beta programs, that they don't either. In fact, in our first closed beta, we too had one of these solutions. Not only did we confirm the obvious on this point, but another very important issue became apparent... Let's say I hand out my 1-way anonymous number to 30 people. Well I want to dispose of the number because one of those people are hassling me. So I dispose of it, and now I've disposed of the number that the other 29 people had! Wrong answer. Of course I could black list the person hassling me by blocking their phone number, but then they could just call me from another number.

Consumers need these kinds of solutions to behave like a utility. If they want to maintain their privacy, then they want to maintain their privacy 100%. 1-way implementations are 50%. The obvious point here is that solutions like ours are 2-way solutions, where one's privacy is secured when making and receiving calls. The trick is to build them around a simple yet functional user interface (both voice and graphically). Not only are we doing this, but we're making it work with familiar user behavior...we're making it happen in multiple modalities. You'll see what I mean soon.

-MC