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]

32 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] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I think it's actually the other way around. BECAUSE phone numbers are linked to our accounts and identities, it makes us vulnerable to SIM swapping. They should only be used for calling and texting people, nothing more. But nowadays we need to link our personal details to them, our accounts, which introduces this vulnerability because then it creates this incentive for an attack

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, it would just be nice if someone made a mobile computing device that wasn't phone-capable at all. It is outdated functionality to have just one or two services use a totally separate protocol from everything else.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

A tablet ?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

The ones I had which allow mobile data connections also allow use as a phone. Not to mention that most tablets are the wrong size to carry them around all the time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

If you live in a country where carriers are required to identify phone numbers and do identity checks for SIM swaps they'll never, ever, allow someone to get a SIM with your number without providing valid govt ID. That's why it solves the issue and its safe. Just look at the numbers / stats and you'll find that the SIM swapping attacks happen on countries where no identification is required.