US proposes ID requirement for all mobiles/ sims

Exemplar

Personally I have no problem with this and would actually encourage it to be enforced globally, full story here:

http://www.phonearena.com/news/California-Congresswoman-proposes-law-that-would-require-new-phone-buyers-to-present-personal-ID_id79672

Zips up flame suit..

System

It's interesting. One of the original touted advantages of PAYG was no ID etc needed. Anybody with cash can walk in and buy a phone and PAYG sim.

Thats the UK. USA have a greatly higher paranoia index than the UK

Exemplar

!!!!!! wrote: »

Thats the UK. USA have a greatly higher paranoia index than the UK

Or do they?:rotfl:

macman

It's already required in a number of EU countries: Spain, Italy, Germany, and I think France. Possibly others? Hardly a major deterrent to someone purchasing multiple SIMS for use in criminal or terrorist activities, as they're surely going to have false ID's available anyway.

boliston

Perhaps we will see more phones being stolen for the sim rather than the phone?

I can see that a contract sim would get cancelled but would people bother to cancel a payg sim if it was stolen whilst in their phone?

Ian011

With more than five billion SIMs already active worldwide, it's a bit late to be thinking about tying ID to usage.

Exemplar

Ian011 wrote: »

With more than five billion SIMs already active worldwide, it's a bit late to be thinking about tying ID to usage.

interesting point. However i do work for a telecoms company and we can track/ cease/ bar any SIM that we have supplied or have provisioned.

d123

Maybe countries are seeing it as a revenue gaining opportunity, Nigeria recently fined some of their networks for allowing unregistered sim cards on their network, one of the networks, MTN is apparently going to be fined US$15 BILLION!

http://naija247news.com/2016/03/nigerian-parliament-to-increase-mtn-fine-to-15-6-billion/

Roger1

macman wrote: »

It's already required in a number of EU countries: Spain, Italy, Germany, and I think France. Possibly others?

Also in some non-EU countries such as Switzerland and South Africa.

sdduk

So what happeneds to all the millions of sims that are not regestered already?
Are they going to cut them all off or send a text message to go to the network provider and register.

System

Exemplar wrote: »

interesting point. However i do work for a telecoms company and we can track/ cease/ bar any SIM that we have supplied or have provisioned.

But you can't identify the owner which is what is being discussed.

It's pretty obvious that the network that the sim is using can track/bar/cease the SIM. What they cannot do is identify all phones and SIMS purchased by John Smith for example