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FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
251–260 of 417 posts
Re: FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
#252Regardless of this, I see phone network as a legacy thing that in perfect world should already be replaced with lightweight upgradeable calling protocol over IPv6.
This would apply equally to said IP calling network since you'd need a SIM card to access the tower interesting strewn across the country either way.
WiFi / pure-VOIP based calling should be able to disambiguate between the network and the messaging layers. This means that a given cellular modem wouldn't be traceable to a specific contact, or call history. The modems could be swapped amongst individuals readily.
This is similar to the situation that already exists for PSTN voice comms currently: Whatsapp, Signal, Jitsi, or similar voice- or video-messaging systems. They'll run over an arbitrary network, through VPNs, etc.
Mind, the major comms-apps/social networks might have their own ID requirements forced on them, but there's far less a capability to keep people from defecting from these.
I continue to think that global PSTN networks are pretty close to general collapse, given spam, robocalls, harassment, tracking, and similar forms of abuse. Millennials & GenZ are already notorious for their reluctance to make or take phone calls.
https://theconversation.com/young-people-hate-making-phone-c...>
Re: FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
#253Re: FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
#254This is already the case in most (all?) EU countries. Government-issued photo ID is required to activate a SIM card.
If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country
Re: FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
#255I'm always surprised how bad ideas spread faster than good ideas among our rulers. Here is a map of countries where an ID is required (or not) https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/sim-card-regist...
If you want anonymous eSIM, Silent Link is pretty good. Pay with crypto, works nearly all countries/networks, quite reasonably priced.
Re: FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
#256And yet, for some reason, it is impossible to stop spam calls and texts.
Having looked into the history of call tracking / blocking, it's pretty evident that major US telcos have very little interest in making marketing calls difficult. However tenuous the association between "marketing" and the actual practice of the scammers, harassers, abusers, and worse generating literally billions of such calls monthly (see: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/ringing-in-our-fears-2025-...>, "The monthly average of scam and telemarketing calls increased from 2.14 billion a month in 2024 to 2.56 billion a month through September, according to YouMail").
AT&T's efforts to thwart effective government regulation and mitigation stand out especially. The industry oranisation ATIS (https://atis.org/>) has been central to blocking any effective action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Telecommunication...>.
Re: FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open to the possibility that I’m just cynical but my faith is very low that these comment processes are anything more than a regulatory requirement for the illusion of due diligence which legitimizes the actual corporate lobbying and security state actually making the policy.
The real issue is that it's a perpetual problem -- there are NGOs that literally pull out the same one pager, an endless dance of having some 1L repeat the same points over and over and over. (Why is it called a 1 pager you ask? Because your elected officials won't read more than that.) I made a grand total of one hill visit. I told them I'm tired of repeating the same things over and over, and if you make my interns…
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Re: FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
#258Regwall / archive: https://archive.is/ZobUQ>
(NB: the notion of having to register to read content strikes me as equally reprehensible as requiring KYC for access to the telephone network.)
Re: FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wish I could recall the podcast I listened to a few years ago that was telling the history of robo-dialers and caller ID spoofing. The general gist was that AT&T was making money off it from 1-900 operators so they weren't eager to self-regulate. So even though ending spam calling is a bipartisan issue , feet were dragged on the implementation. If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was i…
https://archive.org/details/3f25eeb8affc11e6892a43edc8087050 ~~I _think_ this is the one.~~ God I miss this podcast. Edit: this IS the one.
Are you familiar with the Search Engine podcast?
Re: FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> like most other places Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible. The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
Argentina doesn't also, you can just buy a SIM card off the newsstand.
In my experience, you then need to activate it using real data from real people. I lent my data to a colombian colleague a couple of years ago, as he did not have a DNI yet.