It all used to be very easy in Australia, you bought the phone at a supermarket and gave bogus info when registering the SIM. Then the “War on Terror™” began and the government started taking things a bit more seriously started mandating the paper registration forms needed to be completed or the retailers could get in trouble. But your average supermarket worker wasn’t going to take the time to do that and it was way too widespread for the government to actually crack down on it.

Took a few years but the Telcos started actually paying attention to the fact that the majority of prepaid phones weren’t getting completed paperwork at point of sale so they just moved to make all sim card activations require online or over the phone ID checks.

Every bit of training I ever did made it clear it was all about catching terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles, which of course means “We want all that juicy data without citizens asking any annoying questions.”

It is a really good filter for me, any company that wants to harvest the bogus information I will use to access them had better do a good job of convincing me it’s worth the effort.

I have a similar take on online stores wanting me to create a login to get a shipping cost, unless they are offering a truly unique item, or outrageously good price I just don’t buy anything from them.

If we all had a similar standards these bits of UX fuckery would disappear over time, unfortunately most people don’t even think about it.