Hi! I was reading scare stories in Germany about people being harassed by call center workers who had the customers’ real numbers. This does not sound like a good thing, so I have been learning about phone number cloaking or masking. For example:
What are Masked Phone Numbers? - Twilio.
Does anyone have any experience of this? I will be digging into it later this week and into next. Thanks! M
Would the phone numbers ever be needed in the app? You can mark a column as protected, so it is never downloaded to a user device.
An order would be placed in one part of my app.
…then we package the order and send it to a 3rd party company for fulfilment. So I need to send a way of contacting the person if there are issues for the delivery.
Uber does call masking, so it is a relatively normal thing to do when you do have to use phone numbers.
Twilio and Telesign seem to be two services that could be used (and integrated into an app, fingers crossed).
Well, you could probably do some hacky stuff to manipulate it and visually mask it on the screen, but the actual phone number might still be visible in the underlying data if somebody goes looking for it. What’s the format of the phone number? Is it consistently the same format?
Does row owners take care of this?
Row owners takes care of most of the issue - for those within the app. I was thinking about people outside of the app, such as a delivery person. They might not even have access to my app (so not an issue for me), but I could protect the customer by creating a masked number and only sharing that.
Regarding number format, it is likely to be several formats. The first use of my app will be Germany (already different lengths of area code, etc), and then maybe parts of Europe.
Fortunately this is not a must-do feature, so dropped for now 
Thanks for your insights and ideas!
Oh I see, for people who might actually need to use it.