The next your operator asks you to tell them more about yourself, just do it, unless you want to become like the 1 million customers who have been cut off from their service in Bangladesh.

Anonymous phones are phones that you can buy without the need for identification. These are the pre-paid phone kits that you see in your local malls, and are usually the type of phone that bad guys use when they’re doing something dirty, like say calling a fellow terrorist, remotely activating a bomb, et cetera. So this is really a big issue on security, as you can see.

Unfortunately, more than a million anonymous SIMs have been cut off by mobile operators in Bangladesh, since they failed to let the operators know their identity.

A deadline was first imposed upon users for the process of letting the operators know their identities, but they ignored it twice, and now suffer the consequences.

This might not be a scenario that can be called “Big Brother-ly” but it’s still one of those few cases where you can probably hear yourself saying, “Is all this monitoring really necessary, or are the authorities just not good enough to do their job correctly that they need to pull the entire population to cooperate?” I guess we’ll never know.

via The Register