FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones By Forcing Telecoms to Get All Customers’ IDs

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Privacy<br>FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones By Forcing Telecoms to Get All Customers’ IDs

Joseph Cox

Jun 9, 2026<br>at 11:11 AM

The FCC wants to legally force telecoms to collect new and renewing customers’ government issued identity number and physical address, impacting everyone from the privacy-conscious to domestic abuse survivors. “We never thought that would happen here.”

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to make it effectively impossible for people to buy what many call burner phones—a phone not explicitly linked to your identity at the point of purchase—which would impact privacy-conscious people, to domestic abuse survivors, to journalists, and many more. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number and their physical address, alarming privacy advocates and civil rights activists who compare the measures to those from authoritarian countries where it can be difficult to buy a mobile phone plan without giving up your identity.<br>The proposed change would drastically shake up how people obtain phone plans in the U.S., and have all sorts of privacy and cybersecurity knock-on effects. The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers, with telecoms being required to collect other information on business and foreign customers like the intended use case of their bulk phone plan purchase and their IP address. But the changes would mean telecoms collect data on all new and renewing customers, and the FCC provides a long list of other things that the collected data could help authorities with.<br>💡<br>Do you know anything else about this proposed change? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“For decades, civil libertarians have looked overseas at authoritarian countries where the government requires people to register to get a mobile phone to ensure they can be tracked. We never thought that would happen here,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project told 404 Media in an email. “But make no mistake: with this rulemaking, the government is contemplating taking away people’s ability to get a burner phone, which will hurt low-income people, domestic violence victims, and anyone else who cares about their privacy.”<br>In a synopsis of the proposed changes, the FCC writes, “Specifically, we seek comment on requiring originating providers to, at a minimum, obtain and retain the name, physical address, government issued identification number, and an alternate telephone number of any new and renewing customer before granting access to its services.” The goal of collecting this data, the FCC writes, is to deter some scammers from getting onto a telecom network in the first place, and so “enforcers will be better able to identify the scammers when they do.” The FCC compares the changes to the sort of data collected by banks to prevent money laundering.<br>One section stresses that the newly collected data would help “law enforcement to more easily identify callers that use the network to perpetuate crimes by ensuring that voice providers have accurate and complete customer information.” It goes on to ask if the data would help identify people buying and selling illicit goods; the investigation of “fraud, espionage, or influence operations that undermine national security”, and “address abuse in text messaging networks.”

“Criminals continue to leverage the anonymity provided by phone calls and texts to defraud Americans and exploit communications networks to further other crimes,” one section reads.<br>At the moment, the FCC is seeking comments about its proposed changes, with interested or concerned parties—think telecom companies, law enforcement, or privacy advocates—able to weigh in. But the intention of the FCC is clear: the agency wants telecoms to be legally obligated to collect much more personally identifying information on new and returning customers, linking them directly to their phone number and phone usage data. The FCC also asks whether the amount of data collected should change depending on whether a customer is seeking a prepaid or a postpaid service plan.<br>Multiple privacy and technology experts strongly pushed back against the proposed changes. “This proposal by the FCC will do little to combat scams and robocalls, since most people doing that will have no trouble creating fake...