Indonesia Pushes Biometric SIM Registration Internationally and Partners With Estonia on Digital Security
At the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Doha, communications ministry officials reaffirmed face-verification requirements for mobile SIM registration under Regulation 7/2026 and announced a digital security partnership with Estonia.
Indonesia has used the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Doha to reaffirm its biometric SIM registration policy and expand international digital-security cooperation. Communications ministry officials confirmed implementation of Ministerial Regulation 7/2026, which requires facial-recognition verification for prepaid SIM registration to prevent number misuse, and announced a partnership with Estonia on digital security. The ministry also promoted internet equity as part of its international agenda.
The biometric requirement has applied since early 2026, so the international stage is reaffirmation rather than new policy. Its practical significance lies in compliance: the rule obliges every operator and sales channel to run liveness detection, face matching against the civil registry, audit trails and personal-data safeguards, and compliance elsewhere in telecom has been uneven, with quota-balance rules met by only 50 to 70 percent of operators as of October according to earlier reporting.
Uneven compliance historically pushes regulators toward monitoring tools and operators toward standardized verification stacks. The identity layer, document extraction, liveness and matching with logging, becomes a recurring procurement category across operator channels as enforcement matures.