China, a country of over 1 billion people and home to the world’s largest operator, China Mobile, has passed legislation that requires everyone who purchases a SIM card to show identification. Even foreigners who are just visiting. Now this isn’t unheard of, every time the IntoMobile team goes to Spain for Mobile World Congress we all get prepaid SIM cards and have to present our passports. The United States has been trying to get similar legislation passed for several years now.
Here in Finland you can buy a SIM card as easily as you can buy a loaf of bread. In fact, the only people I know on post-paid accounts are the jet set crowd who need international roaming. Back to China, the country has 785 million people using mobile phones. That’s over twice the population of the United States. On average, a typical person in China will get 43 text messages a week, of which 12 are spam according to China Daily.
That’s the purpose of this added bureaucratic step. Unwanted messages, pornographic messages, fraud, and potential terrorism, will be greatly reduced. Additionally this law limits Chinese citizens to owning “only” 18 SIM cards. Note that China is one of the few markets around the world where selling phone numbers is a lucrative business. The number 4, pronounced “si” in Mandarin, is very similar in sound to word for death. Because of that phone numbers that have many 4s are quite cheap, whereas phone numbers that have many 8s, the luckiest number in the country, sell for an insane amount of cash. Not the image above of an elevator in China and how there’s no 4th floor.
That isn’t the case in Bulgaria where everyone who has ever owned the phone number 0888 888 888 has died a mysterious death. The only phone number I remember, sadly, is my old mobile number while I was studying at University in Texas. It was a 10 digit number and 4 of the said digits were the number 8.
Do you know your own phone number? I don’t.
[Image via Dianhasan]