The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) completely rejected the project of the decree by which the National Register of Mobile Telephony Users (Panaut) was created, considering that it would violate the right to privacy and intimacy of citizens by collecting personal and biometric data from consumers. The ministers also did not consider that the measure would help combat telephone extortions.
However, during the discussion, Minister Margarita Ríos Farjat and Minister Luis María Aguilar Morales considered that prepaid lines, that is, those that work with recharges, should be registered because in this modality, users are not obliged to provide information. personal unlike postpaid lines.
Both ministers pointed out that for the registration of prepaid lines, consumers should submit their name and proof of address, which should not represent a violation of privacy, since people submit this type of information for other procedures.
“Many of these data are already provided for the contracting of other services such as credit card, fixed telephony, among others”, in recent days Minister Fajart, during her participation in the discussion to discard the telephone registry.
According to data from the consulting firm The Ciu at the end of 2021, there are 132.4 million mobile lines in Mexico, of which 82.8% are under the recharge scheme and only 17.2% under the postpaid scheme.
This would mean that 82.1% of mobile users would be required to hand over their personal data. In addition, this segment has gained more strength due to the pandemic and the increase in inflation that puts pressure on the economy of users.
But experts consider that the ministers’ proposal is not justified and is discriminatory as it intends to force only people who have a prepaid line to hand over their data to access a connectivity service, which, they emphasize, is a human right. While citizens who have a postpaid plan deliver their data voluntarily and not by obligation, and this information is used by companies to domicile or to know where they can charge the user for their mobile service.
In addition, they rule out that a database of prepaid mobile lines helps to mitigate the crime of extortion, on the contrary, it will violate the identity of the users.
“We already know that technology is fallible and that it can be circumvented, it is absurd to think that someone who is going to commit a crime is going to make a phone call from a registered cell phone, be it prepaid or postpaid. Mexico’s insecurity problem is not in the lack of a registry of people who use a telephone. We have to start looking for other reasons why we have this problem,” said Michel Hernández Tafoya, president of Observatel.
Are mobile phone databases a global trend?
Luis Fernando García, executive director of R3D: Network in Defense of Digital Rights, mentions that although obtaining personal information from users becomes more relevant for nations, only in countries that are considered authoritarian do they have a database to access a phone line.
According to the director of R3D, nations such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates require the delivery of personal data to access a mobile phone chip.
“We have to turn to see where these records are mandatory. I would ask if Mexico wants to locate there or if we want to locate the country in nations that favor connectivity,” said the Observatel manager.
What options exist to deal with telephone extortion?
Experts consider that the authorities already have sufficient tools to combat the crime of telephone extortion, from geolocation, the intervention of communications to the obligation by law to disconnect the telephone signal in prisons.
Even telecommunications companies have sought the authorities to collaborate in the detection of extortion crimes by creating a database of telephone numbers from which users report that they have received extortion calls.
“From my point of view, the need for a registry of telephone lines is false because there are already tools to investigate and inhibit extortion, but the State has not done so due to corruption and incompetence,” said the R3D manager.
For Michel Hernández Tafoya, it is necessary to generate a comprehensive security strategy in which the authorities and mobile phone companies work together to mitigate this crime that afflicts citizens, but not by registering telephone lines.
