I'm not sure why Australia does that, but it's really annoying.
* Not trying to justify it either direction.
It isn't for tracking homeless people. It's for building network graphs of calls from burner phones to organised crime people.
Most of the time the burners are useless, but once you have a cluster of them you can automatically do data matching on them all, and sometimes (often!) they got lazy on a couple and used the same identities to buy them.
Once you have a few using the same identity then you track that identity down.
The friction in forcing identification means that lazy criminals at the bottom of the structure at some point forget to do it.
Suppose you buy a PAYG SIM, and then use it to make death threats or bomb hoax calls. Easy for the police to track you down and arrest you. (Of course, they still could using other means, like geolocation, but that could be a lot more work.)
And, of course, it isn't foolproof – one could use a fake ID, one could pay some random poor person to buy it for you using their ID, etc – but, the kind of people who make death threats or bomb hoaxes usually aren't very smart.
Showing your passport is functionally equivalent to getting your picture taken. It ends up as a record in their databases that says John Smith, with these biometrics, purchased a SIM with this number.
I guess using Chinese surveillance tech is a roundabout way of getting them to pay attention, as happened with the Hikvision cameras.
It does not mean that usage is monitored, and usage is the important privacy aspect.
Furthermore, this just puts mobile phones on par with landlines. It used to be that having a phone meant having a landline at home, and obviously that meant knowing exactly who a number belonged to.
There needs to be a balance for everything in the real world. And even most Western countries have concluded that requiring IDs for SIM cards is a necessary measure.
Now, for Chinese authorities one issue (without even going into politics) is that China is a very low trust society where it is almost expected that everyone will flaunt the rules at the first opportunity. So I am half guessing that the government sees technological solutions as a way around that.
(As for renting a room, it would be crazy for a landlord not to know who their tenant is just for practical reasons considering land and tenancy laws in most EU countries)
I think one would have to be especially naive to believe that an ID requirement is in place without any provision for usage monitoring.
Edit: Downvotes for a factual answer? Pathetic.
> (As for renting a room, it would be crazy for a landlord not to know who their tenant is just for practical reasons considering land and tenancy laws in most EU countries)
That's circular reasoning, and could be applied to any law.
Edit: How it's circular reasoning:
"The law is necessary because it has been enacted."
"It's necessary to collect ID when renting a room, because the law requires it."
As for how "most Western countries determined it was necessary" - there weren't exactly large, public debates and demands as happened for e.g. gay rights, were there? The laws just came about, very discreetly.
Edit2, due to posting limit: I did no conflating - my point applies to both your statements, separately.
Edit: I have seen your edit.
I did not write that. You are conflating 2 unrelated topics and 2 unrelated parts of my comment although they were clearly separated.
In many countries IDs are not required by law in order to rent a house (afaik). In the UK (which I know most) it only became a requirement a couple of years ago, specifically to check that the prospective tenant was not an illegal immigrant (in fact the requirement is not to check IDs but not to rent to illegal immigrants...)
Landlords require an ID quite independently of any legal requirement because it does not make sense to entrust a real property to someone if you do not know who they are due to the financial liability and the legal procedures required to evict.
In some commercial and legal relations it simply does make sense to assert the identity of the other party.
Not really. Unless you lived alone, a landline was often shared with everyone in the household. Furthermore, just because there is a link (by necessity of delivering a service to a physical location), doesn't mean there needs to be a link.