VOIP Features that Protect Your Privacy when you Work at Home

By Leanne Tremblay

Are you running a home business out of your garage, your dining room table, or home office that everybody in the family seems to use? While work at home families have loads of advantages for income potential and lifestyle, one of the downsides can be a loss of personal privacy when the line between your work life and personal life gets blurry.

There’s also a cost in family privacy. For example, do you feel comfortable using your home mailing address and your personal phone number or fax number for your work at home job or business? Perhaps when you’re just starting out this seems like the easiest solution. But eventually, you have to decide if you want work calls mixing with your family’s calls.

Home business technology has certainly come a long way and work at home phone features are no exception. Thanks largely to voice-over-IP (VOIP), or internet phone services with flat rate plans and free features, you can make a small one-person shop on the inside look like a big regional or even national office on the outside. If you are concerned about protecting the privacy of your business or your family because you work at home, VOIP also addresses those concerns.

Privacy Features

Here are the top privacy features offered with a VOIP unlimited long distance plan.

Remember, most of these features are included for free. Regular phone companies often charge individually for features, making it expensive to have more than one or two active on your account.

Anonymous Call Rejection – lets you reject incoming calls from callers who have blocked their phone number and name. This means that you automatically screen out SPAM callers and telemarketers, and only take calls from people who want to identify themselves. Use this feature sparingly for your business line to avoid losing good potential customers that also value their privacy.

Outbound Caller ID Blocking – lets you to block the delivery of your caller ID when calling other numbers.

Call Blocking – lets you to reject certain incoming calls, a great way to screen calls from specific numbers.

Call Forwarding Selective – lets you to forward certain incoming calls to other destinations. For example, calls from important customers can automatically be directed to another number, such as business line, or mobile.

Do Not Disturb – lets you direct calls to voicemail without ringing your phone, which is important sometimes when you’re in a meeting. You can also have your phone emit a short ring burst to let you know when a call has been sent to voicemail.

Selective Call Acceptance and Rejection – lets you to allow or reject certain incoming calls depending on criteria that you specify.

Find Me – lets you to define a list of phone numbers which are called one after the other when you receive an incoming call. For example, when your mom calls, you can first ring your house, then your cell phone, but when a business client calls, you can ring your cell phone first, followed by your office number.

VOIP Service also allows you to purchase additional phantom phone numbers to give to prospective customers or colleagues so they don’t get your real phone number. Those phantom numbers can follow you if you work on the road.

New VOIP Services

There are also some free VOIP services that are ideally suited to protect your privacy if you work at home:

GrandCentral (grandcentral.com) is an award winning new service for “inbound calling”—that is people calling you. When you sign up for a free GrandCentral account, you’re given a 10-digit GrandCentral number. Then, you set up your account with all the numbers of the other phone services you use, such as mobile, office, home, or cottage. When someone calls your GrandCentral number, you can have any or all of these phones ring. It protects your privacy because you don’t have to give out personal numbers to receive important business phone calls.

TalkPlus (talkplus.com) is another new service with a free 14-day trial. With TalkPlus you can add ANOTHER phone number to your existing mobile phone. You can use the number for business or for personal use. If your mobile phone is your primary means of communication, you can use TalkPlus to separate your personal life from your business life. And, when you make calls from your mobile phone, you can set up TalkPlus to “spoof” the caller ID so it looks like you’re calling from the office, home, cottage, or wherever.

TalkPlus currently supports selected mobile phones on Cingular, T-Mobile, and Sprint mobile networks.

Leanne Tremblay is a freelance writer and publisher of www.quickstartvoip.com, a site all about the wonders of internet phone service, free video phone services, and internet phone hardware for the home office.

Copyright 2007 Work-at-Home.org