- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
The Indian telecommunications authority, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), has instructed eight messenger services to implement a permanent binding to inserted SIM cards. Affected are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, ShareChat, as well as the Indian services Arattai, JioChat, and Josh. According to the directive, the companies must ensure within 90 days that their services can only be used with a physically inserted SIM card.
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“to protect against foreign cybercrime”
Mate your country is famous for allowing cybercrime in your borders
So does it just mean you can’t use any of those apps if you use them on PC/tablet? Wonder if that would be big enough of a driver to push people to use something else for communication
The apps already use your phone number, on pc you connect to your phone app. But it used to be possible to change your account phone number, and that’s what they seem to have blocked.
My 4g router has a phone number but you can’t install APKs on it.
I have an Indian colleague who told me he was threatened with arrest after a traffic stop for having element and conversations installed on his phone as the cop told him those are used by terrorists and he should just use WhatsApp
And that’s the truest, just unpleasant, answer to all the talk about new messenger services and emerging replacements.
Power doesn’t care about rules. Power does care that you don’t have a way to communicate freely. Power punishes you if you try to find a way.
Social problems are not solved by technical means. Or, for the sake of correctness, - they are, but those technical means are called weapons of war. To change the balance of power so that your wishes were respected.
He thought terrorists also use email and drink water, but decided not to tell the cop that.
Why would a traffic cop be looking at his phones chat apps?!
Cops are doing this in the US too.
Why would a traffic cop be looking at his phones chat apps?!
They were trading pokemons in pokemon go?
Need to start obscuring what is installed on devices. Terminal based communication and host it on a remote server that you connect to with SSH so when they inspect your phone there is nothing there.
At least if I had something to hide I would be way ahead of dumb laws like this.
Do you want new messenger services? Because this is how you get new messenger services.
So this is why Whatsapp logged me out of all my accounts with Indian telephone number yesterday and won’t let me back in…
I think that SIM physical presence in the terminal adds just a bit more of difficulty to the main abusers but a lot of pain to the non ones, the apparent bind to univuqous real identity is illusory and fragile, by now we should assume WhatsApp and Telegram as potentially anonymous and spam as a mail account…
Well it’s hard to circumvent as it is some network apis provided by the telecom operators. Whatsapp will ask your device to connect to a url using your mobile data bearer to authenticate and the operator will tell them if you’re actually who you declare to be.
US iPhone have no sim slot. How that work in inida?
eSim
physically inserted SIM card
What do they achieve from this?
Whenever you don’t know, the answer is money.
Control of dissent, rather.
