Why can't these same companies and organizations push for phones to be anonymous?
Why should a 'phone' be primarily a person tracker that happens to have voice communications built in?
The whole problem is that a person's identity is more and more entangled with a tracking device.
Since then I've been very skeptical of all claims of what you can "just" do to avoid being tracked. This problem can't be solved by individual action or paranoia it's too big and complex now.
I'm not sure what the threat model here is. If the "government actively trying to build a case against them" involves government agents following you in unmarked vans, then the government being able to track you through your SIM should be the least of your worries. If you're merely on some government watchlist (ie. there aren't agents following you), I don't see how it would be hard to cleanly buy a burner phone/sim, especially in the post pandemic age where face masks are socially acceptable.
You can't really protect yourself from the US government in any meaningful sense if they decide to end or ruin your life, but what I described above seems like a reasonable thing that people would want to do for reasons both legal and not.
Pure conjecture on my part, and I haven’t worked in this area but I had lots of friends in gov security and mobile standards groups.
Nobody I’ve talked to thinks it’s possible to stay anonymous on any commercial cellular network.
You might be able to push a few anonymous phone calls or surf a few hours but soon your typical browsing habits, app usage and contacts will match you up with similar existing profiles based purely on the metadata.
Honestly just narrowing it down to a few dozen people is good enough to get unmasked.
The Federal Government retains a copy of all https-encrypted communications indefinitely on the understanding that the encryption may be broken at some point.
The push to HTTPS was gleefully supported by the US federal government. HTTPS is not a panacea, and is generally useless for most non-sales applications.
HTTPS significantly raises the bar on MITM attacks, such as ISPs adding or replacing ads with their own.
It also prevents folks sitting in the same coffeeshop as you from snooping.
Calling "generally useless" is incredibly uncharitable.
But I'm a luddite who also thinks we shouldn't have gone beyond HTML 4.01 as a spec, and that JS in the browser is a pox upon the web.
The phone network requires a geophysical route/medium across which to shluff a packet. Said packet is destined for an endpoint. Said endpoint is associated with a payer. Said payer, in order to pay, is virtually guaranteed to have had to do KYC at some point.
Ergo, if you can call, you can be tracked with only knowledge of the endpoint, and the topology of the networking medium.
Nature of the beast I'm afraid. Your forebearers wanted this. Are you not pleased? Does this mot make you feel safe? They worked very hard on it... For your safety, you see!
Directly answering your question: because phone companies are natural monopolies, and have strong incentives to prevent any public-access provider that wouldn't need unique identifiers tied to billing information from coming in. Location tracking is a direct consequence of cell towers only having a limited range: and because telcos have no real competitors, there's no way a privacy-centered carrier that sells itself on not doing anything with that data can pop up.
I do wish public access LTE existed in a similar form to free WiFi or municipal broadband. Or even just more municipal broadband.
This article is about individual apps siphoning location data to the US government à la Tim Hortons, though, not phone providers themselves tracking users, although that also does happen.