Kurt McKee

lessons learned in production

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Hey there! This article was written in 2014.

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Caller ID blocking options

Posted 25 September 2014 in caller id, life, and work

I've been considering asking my company to drop my work cell phone plan and pay for my personal cell phone plan. Some people might cringe to be more accessible to their company but work already calls my personal phone all the time. Therefore, the biggest concern I have about doing this is that I sometimes have to interface with outside people who don't need my personal cell phone number.

I can give out my desk number and have that forward to my personal cell phone but if I return a call I need my personal number hidden and there just don't seem to be options for doing this systematically. Sure, you can find apps in the Google Play store but they all appear to be designed with the assumption that you're blocking or changing your caller ID number because you want to be a douchebag to people. What I've yet to see is a setting or an app that simply dials *67 on outgoing phone calls if certain rules are met. I imagine it would work with a blacklist/whitelist option:

  • Blacklist version: Only dial *67 if the contact is in a specific category in your address book, like "Work".
  • Whitelist version: Always dial *67 unless the contact is in your address book and is not in a specific category in your address book.

I've seen articles suggesting that more and more businesses are supporting a bring-your-own-device model, but I'm not finding apps or settings that would support my use case. Does anyone have app or search keyword suggestions? Searching "spoof caller id" simply turns up apps advertising that you can "Find out if your ex is ignoring you! Confuse your friends! Get through to someone really important!" which is not my goal here.

Update : I finally found the right search term: "android auto dial prefix". This led me to Prefixer, which appears to be exactly what I want. The free version allows you to configure a single rule but I think that'll be sufficient.

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