Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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I have an issue with how SIM cards are handled in most countries (lemmy.ml)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Almost all countries require official authentication to activate a SIM card. This seems to me as a huge privacy problem, if the country can track sim cards across cell towers and connect them to a person. It seems like a dystopian system, that we litterely can not hide from our governments without turning off our smartphones. It seems incredibly unnecessary to me and just sets up the system to be abused.

Or do I understand something wrong?

What can we do against this? There are some sim cards that can be bought second hand, but they will not be a long term solution.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The thing is, even if you would not need to link your identity to your sim card, it would still be trivial to identify who you are if you use your phone like a normal human. Thanks to cell towers.

But yes this is just an excuse and does not stop much crime. If you want to break into a bank or hurt someone just leave your phone at home and you already circumvented this measure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's even simpler than that; you probably pay for your SIM credit online / with a card, which is much easier to tie to a person than using cell towers for tracking.

[–] cucumber_sandwich 4 points 10 months ago

Prepaid and cash is still pretty common though. Even paying for prepaid codes with card might break the identification.