The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to make it effectively impossible for people to buy what many call burner phones—a phone not explicitly linked to your identity at the point of purchase—which would impact privacy-conscious people, to domestic abuse survivors, to journalists, and many more. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number and their physical address, alarming privacy advocates and civil rights activists who compare the measures to those from authoritarian countries where it can be difficult to buy a mobile phone plan without giving up your identity.
The proposed change would drastically shake up how people obtain phone plans in the U.S., and have all sorts of privacy and cybersecurity knock-on effects. The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers, with telecoms being required to collect other information on business and foreign customers like the intended use case of their bulk phone plan purchase and their IP address. But the changes would mean telecoms collect data on all new and renewing customers, and the FCC provides a long list of other things that the collected data could help authorities with.
“For decades, civil libertarians have looked overseas at authoritarian countries where the government requires people to register to get a mobile phone to ensure they can be tracked. We never thought that would happen here,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project told 404 Media in an email. “But make no mistake: with this rulemaking, the government is contemplating taking away people’s ability to get a burner phone, which will hurt low-income people, domestic violence victims, and anyone else who cares about their privacy.”
How about just start with shutting down phone number spoofing. Thanks.
But that world hurt the free market!
–Some repugnant republican somewhere
This is just going to mean more phone theft and phone sales going underground. This hurts regular privacy conscious people and changes nothing for criminals.
Yeah.
Need a burner phone? But a used one with a fake name on eBay.
SMS and phone calls are basically dead anyways, I can easily spin up an encrypted service anyways, and run it off public wifi networks.
Ebay soon: “Please upload a selfie and your ID to verify your identity before buying this restricted item”.
By year end I wouldn’t be surprised if they needed a scan of the interior of my colon.
We live in hell.
yeah and won’t effect scammers at all who will use foreign purchasers of the numbers or bury them in shell companies.
I suspect it would also correlate with a dramatic rise in the popularity of mesh networking.
With what SIM?
Just sounds like more surveillance to me.
Control vehicle operability and thus mobility.
Control use of electronic devices, and thus It’s empowerment.
Observe all behavior, external and internal, to know and predict behavior.
Remove privacy and anonymity, to target individuals.
Track relationships, to know all associations and idea propagation.
View all 3d printed designs, to steal concepts and monitor use.
Eliminate wealth and ownership, to disempower the masses.All of this is happening right now. What kind of society does this sound like?
A fascist dystopia?
Only if you’re poor!
Oh my, another dystopian fucking thing happening. And its only the 8000th one this week!
“Kill burner phones” makes it sound like the only people who don’t want to sign up for their phone plan using their id are criminals
Exactly. The authoritarian retort will be “oH? wHaT dO yOu HaVe To HiDe? HmMmmmM?”
It’s the same on every topic. If for the kids doesn’t work, play criminal card. If that doesn’t work try the national security or terrorism card.
The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers
Lol, that’ll never happen, it’s just part of the domestic surveillance network.
Had my google phone stolen internationally. Called google about it and they said “we can’t do anything to brick your phone.” I have an old pixel 6a that ws bricked due to the battery and a security patch they pushed.
Funny how things only work in their favor.
Well that should make it easy to identify and shut down/block the call spam farms.
What’s that? They don’t give a flying fuck about it? Huh, neat.
Anyone feel like all this surveillance is leading up to something?
I am seriously ready to ditch my phone all together and just have a land line.
I am required to use the phone my employer provides me and on my days off it is off too and in my desk.
Sounds like a ridiculous crackdown on privacy that will do abso-fucking-lutely nothing to actually stop spammers, grifters, or other criminals.
With all of the other privacy related crackdowns that have been popular recently, I just assumed that the government already figured out an easy way to identify burner phone users. It’s surprising that it took them this long if that’s not the case.
thought they were already doin this? where does one find a burner phone?
I think you can still but prepaid phones at department/electronics stores. Not everyone needs or wants a monthly bill.
tracfone you just buy the phone and cards and you apply the cards to the phone number. never have to put any personal information.
Where is this? Because Tracphone is Verizon, now, and even under Carlos Slim, required name and address in the USA.
Walmart under the brand name Straight Talk. I believe they are owned by (or at least get their phones from) Tracphone.
It’s all Verizon, now. Iirc, Mint is T-Mobile, Sprint is T-Mobile…we have no not-evil options.
ETA: and it was hella evil under Slim.
They may own it, buy I don’t know how it would shaje out. I use straight talk, because sometimes things get bad and I can pay $10 for a week of service, which is better than nothing in a pinch. This would risk their customer base leaving since a large part of the appeal is being no contract, but if the FCC is going to force them to stop the ability to pay in cash, I may go back to VOIP only.
Mint you just put in a zip code and a name that’s totally real I promise and that’s it.
At least in my experience you can’t activate or put time on the prepaid without creating an account, which requires your details. But perhaps that’s just the big players.
Seems like Google Voice plus public wifi would still allow one to make calls/text without any id associated with it.
doesn’t google voice require another phone number to register?
Plus it’s Google. They already know everything about everyone.
Oh you’re correct I think. It’s been a while since I set it up.
Jmp.chat works great and isn’t run by fascist toadies. :)
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