Sentinel and Shield have always worked well side by side: Sentinel deletes your data from broker sites and builds a fake identity to protect going forward, while Shield gives you a number that keeps your real phone off of forms, listings, and stranger's contact lists. Until recently, though, they mostly ran in parallel — two strong products, not one connected identity. That's changed. A recent Shield update adds a feature that ties the two together directly, and it's worth walking through what upgraded and why it makes the combination meaningfully more private.
What's New: The Shield vCard Now Pairs With Your Sentinel Alias Email
Shield recently added the vCard — a shareable digital business card built around your Shield number, complete with its own QR code and public link. On its own, that solves a real problem: when your number is genuinely public — on a website, a listing, a directory — it's the number that data brokers and scrapers pick up and circulate. Publish a vCard built around your Shield number, and that's the number that gets picked up instead of your real one.
The upgrade is what you can pair it with. If you already have a Sentinel alias email, you can put that on your vCard instead of your real inbox — so the email address sitting in public listings and broker databases is one you can shut off or rotate at will, not the account tied to your real identity. That's a Sentinel feature and a Shield feature working as one artifact for the first time, instead of two separate things you had to manage on your own.
"A name, a number, and an inbox that all trace back to nothing real — published in one card, instead of pieced together across two dashboards."
Voicemail and SMS Still Land Where You Already Trust Them
The vCard pairing sits on top of something Shield already does today: voicemail and SMS sent to your Shield number are delivered directly to your email or to Telegram, not left sitting in a default phone app. If you use Proton Mail, you can point delivery straight to your own Proton inbox — it's a standard part of how Shield routes messages right now, not a future feature. Pairing that with an alias email on your vCard means the same protected inbox is doing double duty: it's the address you publish, and it's where your voicemail and texts actually show up.
To be direct about it: this delivery isn't end-to-end encrypted today. What it does do is move your voicemail and SMS off carrier infrastructure and default phone apps and into an inbox or chat you already control — paired, now, with an email address that was never tied to your real identity in the first place.
Why the Upgrade Matters More Together Than Apart
Sentinel's synthetic personas and ongoing broker deletion handle the identity you don't want traced back to you. Shield's number, IVR screening, and message routing handle the communication you don't want traced back to you. The vCard pairing is the first place those two things become one object you can actually hand someone — a name, an email, and a number, published together, none of it real. That's a small feature on paper, but it closes the gap between "I have two separate privacy products" and "I have one identity that isn't mine to trace."
What to Do With the Upgrade
- Set up your Shield vCard if you haven't already, and put your Shield number on it instead of your real one.
- Add your Sentinel alias email to the vCard instead of your real inbox.
- Check your Shield delivery settings and confirm voicemail and SMS are routed to the email or Telegram account you actually want handling them — your own Proton address included, if that's your preference.
None of these take more than a few minutes, and together they're the difference between a persona and a number that exist separately versus one identity that actually holds together.
One card. One inbox. Nothing traceable.
Pair your Shield vCard with your Sentinel alias email, and route voicemail and SMS to the inbox or chat you already trust — today, not someday.