Q. Prepaid cell phone service can protect privacy. One can buy a phone for cash and pay cash in advance for service. There are no billing records, and records of calls made on the phone are not linked to the owner. Cell phone carriers and governments in a few countries have considered ending prepaid phone service because criminals use it to avoid law enforcement agencies who cannot trace them. What are some legitimate uses for prepaid cell phones? Should prepaid cell phones be banned or otherwise controlled by law (i.e. require cell phone users to register their prepaid cell phones so they can be tracked)? Give your reasons.
As like it’s written in the question, prepaid cell phones service can protect privacy. There are no billing records and also the history of calls made on the phone is not linked to the owner. So criminals often abuse these benefits. Therefore, if criminals use these advantages of prepaid cell phones for their illegal activities, the governments and law enforcement organizations should sanction by making new laws about this and they can consider ending prepaid phone service.
However, in my opinion, it's too extreme to ban this service completely within a short period. And if the government even says that if you still want to use prepaid cell phones, it has to be controlled by law, it becomes way more weird. Because that means the government organizations can require cell phone users to register their prepaid cell phones so they can be tracked. It's suspicious when the government says that from now on, for preventing crimes, we control the choices of payment of cell phones. Especially, if it's when it comes to privacy. The government cannot infringe the people’s privacy and cannot limit the citizen's choices under the name of arresting criminals, saying we're doing a good job.
According to the book “A gift of fire”, it says that data mining might be helpful for picking terrorists out of masses of consumer data, but appropriate procedures are essential to protect innocent but mistakenly selected people(Baase and Henry, p.90). In other words, by prohibiting prepaid cell phones service, it can put villains in jail. But when doing that, it’s more important to protect innocent people than just catching bad people.
Through this question, I got to know for the first time that prepaid cell phones can be used in a bad way but ironically at the same time, it can protect our privacy because it doesn’t make any past data of what we have done.
When I think about legitimate uses for prepaid cell phones, the first thing that came to my mind was just normal people who use various phone plans. You can use monthly plans which are automatically charged and withdrawn from the bank account so it’s really convenient and you don’t have to remember the day when you should pay your phone bills. So rather than prepaid cell phones which you have to buy a certain amount of minutes of access per month, people prefer to use monthly plans. On the contrary, in spite of that, some people like to use prepaid services because they can prevent unnecessary excessive consumption by paying in advance, though it can be a little bit cumbersome.
As a conclusion, my opinion between the government sanction and the prepaid cell phones is that the government can disallow the prepaid cell phones for prevention of crime by law, but at least they should make a room separately for ordinary people to choose other alternatives. And any usual citizen cannot be forced to register and to be tracked by the government with an unreasonable explanation.
