Abine Puts Privacy Back In Your Hands With Twilio SMS and Voice

Abine Puts Privacy Back In Your Hands With Twilio SMS and Voice

Buying a new pair of jeans should be simple. Bring them to the cash register, pay, and leave. When you hand the person behind the counter cash, and they ask you “what’s a good phone number to reach you?” something’s gone awry. There’s tremendous pressure on the everyday consumer to provide private personal information in the most basic transactions.

The folks at Abine believe that everyone should feel comfortable giving out phone numbers, credit card details, and email addresses to anyone they please — as long as they’re masked. Abine lets users mask all their personal digital information so they can get through day to day shopping and business without putting their personal information or finances at risk.

“We wanted Abine to be a one stop shop for privacy needs,” says Thomas Lessard, Quality Operations Officer at Abine. In 2012, Abine rolled out their masked phone numbers service which assigns each user a Twilio phone number that forwards to their real phone number. Abine users can give that number out without the fear of jeopardizing their personal number. If you get calls from a number you don’t recognize and don’t want to follow up using your real number, Abine also offers masked SMS numbers you can use to follow up with little risk.

It’s rare that a brick and mortar store asks for your phone number, credit card, address, email and name all at once, but that’s practically the standard for e-commerce. Abine lets users auto fill information forms with masked credit cards, emails etc, so they don’t have to worry about remembering their masked phone numbers. However, that doesn’t mean that Abine customers won’t call to check in.

Lessard recalls a phone call he got a year ago when an Abine user was asked for her phone number at Kohl’s. She called Lessard to essentially ask “I can do this right? I can just give them this number and not my real number?” The answer was so simple she had to check. Lessard simply replied, “Yes.”

Abine is working on new privacy tools and launching new features rapidly. Learn more about them here.