In 2025, your email address and phone number are compromised before you even sign up for most services. Data brokers have your information. Advertisers have it. And every company you’ve ever created an account with has stored your real contact details in a database that’s one misconfigured S3 bucket away from being posted on a hacker forum.
The traditional advice — use strong passwords, enable two-factor authentication — is necessary but insufficient. It protects your account after an attacker already has your credentials. Cloaked takes a different approach: make sure your real identity is never exposed in the first place.
The Core Concept: Identity Masking
Cloaked is an identity protection app that generates unique, masked email addresses, phone numbers, and virtual payment cards for each service you sign up with.
When you create an account on a new site, instead of entering your real email and phone, you generate a Cloaked identity: a disposable email address that forwards to your real inbox and a masked phone number that forwards calls and texts to your real number. If that company gets breached, sells your data, or starts spamming you — you just delete that identity. Your real email and phone remain clean.
It’s the same principle as virtual credit cards, but applied to your entire identity.
What You Get
Masked email addresses: Generate unlimited unique email addresses (e.g., netflix-7k2m@cloaked.com). Replies work normally — emails forward to your real inbox and you can reply from within Cloaked. You can pause or delete any identity instantly.
Masked phone numbers: Generate virtual US phone numbers for calls and SMS. Works with two-factor authentication codes, which is important — masked numbers receive SMS 2FA just like a real number. You can configure which numbers you want to receive calls vs. texts only.
Virtual payment cards: Create single-use or recurring virtual Visa cards with spending limits. Set a card for Netflix’s exact monthly charge and it’ll never process anything else. Use a one-time card for an unfamiliar merchant and it’s useless if their payment processor is breached.
Autofill: The Cloaked browser extension auto-fills your masked identities on signup forms. When you’re creating a new account, it suggests a new identity and fills in the masked email and phone automatically.
Breach monitoring: Cloaked monitors your identities and alerts you if a masked email appears in a known data breach, tells you which service was breached, and lets you deactivate that identity with one tap.
Real-World Use: Does It Actually Work?
We used Cloaked as our primary identity management tool for six months across dozens of signups. The key question is whether the masking actually holds up in practice — especially for services that do phone verification.
Email masking: Flawless. Every service accepted the masked addresses, replies forwarded cleanly, and we received confirmation emails, newsletters (which we could unsubscribe from by deleting the identity), and transactional emails without issue.
Phone masking: Worked for most services including standard SMS 2FA. A small number of services — notably some banking apps and identity verification services that use carrier lookup APIs — detected the number as a VoIP line and rejected it. This is a known limitation of virtual numbers industry-wide, not unique to Cloaked.
Payment cards: Worked everywhere that accepts Visa. The spending limit feature successfully blocked an attempted overcharge by a subscription service. The recurring card locked to an exact amount is genuinely useful for preventing subscription creep.
Autofill: The browser extension worked reliably in Chrome and Firefox. The suggested identity feature removed most of the friction from using masked identities — instead of opening the app to generate one, it suggests one inline in the signup form.
Privacy Model
Cloaked is a US-based company. Your real email and phone are stored to enable forwarding — this is unavoidable for the core feature to work. Their privacy policy commits to not selling data and not using it for advertising. For high-security use cases (e.g., anonymous accounts), Cloaked provides less anonymity than a dedicated email alias service like SimpleLogin or AnonAddy combined with a VoIP number — but it’s far more convenient for everyday use.
Pricing
Cloaked offers a free tier and paid plans:
- Free: Limited identities, no virtual cards
- Cloaked Pro (~$8/month billed annually): Unlimited identities, virtual cards, full autofill, breach monitoring
- Family plan: Available for multiple users at reduced per-person cost
The free tier is enough to test the concept, but the Pro tier is necessary for meaningful protection across all your accounts.
Who Should Use Cloaked?
Strong fit:
- Anyone who’s been in a data breach and had their email/phone shared or sold
- People who regularly sign up for services, trials, or newsletters
- Small business owners protecting a business email from exposure
- Anyone who has ever received a spam call/text from a company they gave their number to
Less compelling for:
- Users who rarely create new accounts
- International users — virtual phone numbers are US-only
- High-anonymity use cases where you need full separation from your real identity
Compared to Alternatives
| Cloaked | Apple Hide My Email | SimpleLogin | Privacy.com | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Masked email | ✅ unlimited | ✅ iCloud only | ✅ unlimited | ❌ |
| Masked phone | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Virtual cards | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Cross-platform | ✅ | Apple only | ✅ | ✅ |
| Price | ~$8/mo | Free w/ iCloud+ | ~$4/mo | Free |
Cloaked is the only product that combines all three (email, phone, payment) in one place. Apple’s Hide My Email is free but Apple-only and email-only. Privacy.com is excellent for virtual cards but doesn’t touch email or phone. Cloaked’s value is the combination.
Verdict
In a world where data breaches are a certainty rather than a risk, Cloaked’s approach makes genuine practical sense. It shifts the security model from “protect your accounts after breaches happen” to “ensure your real identity isn’t in the database to begin with.”
The product works as advertised for the vast majority of everyday use cases. The limitations around VoIP detection on banking apps are real but affect a small subset of use cases. For the $8/month Pro tier, the combination of email masking, phone masking, and virtual cards provides a level of identity hygiene that’s otherwise inconvenient to achieve manually.
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