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.
Do you want new messenger services? Because this is how you get new messenger services.
As someone who only uses a phone without a SIM card this would suck for me.
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…
This would kill bridges like slidge. They authenticate to WhatsApp using the web interface and that token lasts about two weeks before you have to relink it. A limit of six hours would make it unusable.
What do they achieve from this?
