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.
Both solutions would make it safer, but not impossible to get around. Someone can get the PIN Code in some more analog (getting the paper with the PIN) or digital way (interception with physical access to a phone) and getting into the persons mailbox.
Even if those attacks wouldn’t happen there’s always the chance of something more complex like calling the carrier support and saying you’ve change your address and then a week later ask for a new SIM. It can go wrong very quickly, asking for a govt ID is the easy way to solve it all.
To be fair we can have a better solution, we simply force the fucktards that run banks and other places who send SMS codes to use a simple 2FA method without bullshit apps, just provide a QR code and live with it.