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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

It seems to depend a lot. It's kind of hard in Germany - they wanted my permanent address. I didn't find France as difficult. Iceland didn't care. Italy wanted my passport. Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.

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> Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.

I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).

Foreigners must provide their biometric data to buy a local SIM card. They better just use a tourist SIM card.

But of course, the public Wifi also requires authentication. With, you guessed it, a phone number.

The first and last time I was in Russia was in 2019, passing by Moscow airport, and you already required a phone number to use the public WiFi, but any foreign number was OK.

Yes, that's another law they have. Can't access the internet anonymously, basically. And yes, foreign phone numbers do work.

Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...

Btw you can still buy an anonymous SIM card with cash in the Netherlands in pretty much any supermarket/kiosk/whatever. And if you just need Internet, I haven't had any eSIM provider try to verify my ID so far. Although those can't easily be paid in cash.

That will likely change too if it becomes the last bastion of anonymous SIM cards.

Are there services in the EU similar to Privacy.com? They along with US arm of Revolut lets you use disposable digital cards to buy things, but I don't know if such functionality is legal in the EU.

i use revolut in the eu and disposable cards work. its legal because kyc is only between you and your bank (revolut is a bank operating out of latvia), they are not required or allowed to give your personal info to anyone other than payment processors and police.

In Japan you need to ID as a resident to get a phone number that can make calls, but anyone can get an anonymous data-only SIM

South Korea is also hard

FWIW I bought my Chilean SIM without any problems whatsoever.

Situation circa 2019 at least was that foreign tourists in Chile could purchase a SIM card, but it would be automatically disconnected after some amount of time without registering the phone in a way few foreign tourists would do.

I got mine in 2024. Maybe the shop clerk activated it for me, I don't remember.

Not quite, the requirement is that phones not bought locally need to be registered after 30 days, regardless if someone is a tourist or a Chilean citizen. It's a mix of deterring tax evasion, importing stolen phones, and regulatory homologation. The government delegates responsibility to various telecom companies to have portals to self-register the IMEI with ID, which can be a foreign passport.

I'm sure the cops can get that info, but its mostly to enforce the "only one free register per year". Anyone can buy a phone with cash and use a prepaid sim with zero ID needed.

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