1 day ago
3
Buying a phone without giving up your identity may soon not be possible in the U.S.—and privacy advocates argue the risk extends well past anyone who’s ever bought a prepaid phone at a gas station.
The Federal Communications Commission is weighing rules that would require carriers and VoIP providers to collect a customer’s name, physical address, government-issued ID number, and an alternate phone number before activating or renewing service. The practical effect, critics warn, would be the end of the anonymous prepaid phone. But the bigger concern they’re raising is what happens to that data once every American’s identity is tied to a phone line: a centralized, government-mandated record that touches domestic violence survivors, journalists, whistleblowers, and anyone who simply doesn’t want their name permanently attached to their number.
The proposal, FCC 26-27, was adopted April 30 under the FCC’s long-running robocall docket and is framed as a “know your customer” standard, modeled on the one banks use to screen account holders. But the agency’s own filing states the collected data could also help investigate “fraud, espionage, or influence operations that undermine national security” and “abuse in text messaging networks,” a scope that reaches well beyond spam calls into a broader identity-verification regime for phone service itself.
English (US) ·