> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI
Iran’s currency value fell last week, decreasing from 24,000 to 26,400 rials, in relation to the U.S. dollar. Unfortunately, few Iranians had this important information. Mobile phones, websites, and store-front displays all experienced some form of censorship. In the case of mobile phones, messages containing the word “dollar,” in either Farsi or English, were not delivered. On January 10 this year, similar censoring of phone messages occurred in coincidence with a decrease in the rial’s value.
If governments can so easily exert politically-motivated control over mobile phone systems, what does this mean for mobile banking and the mobile money movement?
For more on this story in Iran, read the Middle East Online’s article “SMS containing ‘dollar’ suppressed in Iran.”
Image Credit: Middle East Online
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September 22, 2012 at 3:19 am
Ignacio Mas
Why do you call mobile money a movement? This doesn’t help the cause (pun fully intended). It’s a commercial opportunity that can do some social good too, that’s all. Or perhaps you are referring to the ‘mobility’ aspect of the service? I think that has more to do with it working everywhere than it working while in motion.
In their surveillance, do governments look into your phone or into the server of the provider? The latter, I think, in which case it is no more and no less vulnerable to government surveillance than any formalized (i.e. electronic) banking system. While are you singling out the mobile money sect?