UK May Require ID to Buy a Mobile Phone

The UK government is reported to be following the move carried out by some countries and require that all mobile phones be registered by their owners. The Sunday Times newspaper says that purchasers of mobile phones would be required to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase.

The newspaper claims that the move is to close a loophole in other planned legislation which requires telecoms operators to keep records of all call records and transactions and hand them over to the government. If the phone which makes the calls cannot be traced to an individual owner, it would render the super-database worthless.

According to estimates from the Mobile World subscriber tracker, there are some 48.6 million subscribers on PrePay services in the UK - compared to an estimated 27.4 million on contract accounts. Typically, when other countries have introduced mandatory registration for prepay subscribers - the operators have reported a drop in subscriber numbers of up to 10 percent.

The office of Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, said it anticipated that a compulsory mobile phone register would be unveiled as part of a law which ministers would announce next year.

"With regards to the database that would contain details of all mobile users, including pay-as-you-go, we would expect that this information would be included in the database proposed in the draft Communications Data Bill," a spokeswoman said.

On the web: Sunday Times - Mobile World

Posted to the site on 19th October 2008