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This is horrible, it should remain a card. Why should a cell phone, or any technological device now be required for participation in society or to validate yourself to any government official?
At that point, where do you draw the line of privacy? You're carrying with you an object that you can't trust 100% and can work against you anytime.
This is truly chilling dystopian type stuff. Soon a cell phone will be required for every "person."
But why? Why do people have to carry a wallet everywhere, unless they want to?
I have my payment cards on my watch. Pre-pandemic, my gym membership card was on my watch. If I had my ID on my watch as well, I don't ever have to worry about a wallet being stolen because I wouldn't carry one.
Sure, people can steal your watch at gunpoint- but it can be remotely disabled (even if you were forced to give your passcode under duress), and you'd still have a physical ID card at home you can use.
I dont think this standard makes a phone a requirement. It just provides a new option.
Is having a computer a requirement to be part of modern society? It certainly helps, and the vast majority of people use them for the convivence, but its not required.
It can be encrypted by a key held within the phone's TPM so it is up to you whether or not to unlock the phone and launch the app that allows the car to be scanned.
> can work against you anytime.
Often does work against you really.
The techno-fetishists are taking over. The kind of people whose reaction to dystopian sci-fi is, "I want those cool gadgets".
A tool is not dystopian, only its usage. This is no more dystopian than Apple Pay, as long as it isn’t mandated and data access and storage is appropriately regulated.
Yes, I think so too. I am professionally a SWE but more and more I feel like a Luddite, and more and more distant from the predominant HN demographic.
_Crucially, the mDL application can ask the user to approve which data to release and may require the user to authenticate with fingerprint or face — none of which a passive plastic card could ever do._
I kinda feel like most people, when threatened by an authority figure with a gun, will approve whatever data that person asks for.
The place where I do think this is valuable is when showing ID to get into a bar, or at a store when purchasing alcohol. The only bit of info the bouncer/cashier needs is whether or not you are of legal drinking age; they don't need to know your actual age/birthday or your name or address.
Until the bouncer (or the bar's contracted developer) thinks it's easier or more secure to use the "Request all data" feature, and logs everything to an unprotected MySQL database. When a bouncer looks at your ID he doesn't write down or save any of that information. This really seems like a solution looking for a problem.
As a sibling mentioned, they already have ID barcode scanners in many bars, and then sell your data to marketing companies.
I think I'd be fine walking away from a bar that used this system to request everything, rather than just a simple "over 21?" verification question. There are plenty of bars out there and I don't have to patronize shitty ones.
Yes they do, bouncers now scan the IDs they look at with a machine.
>I kinda feel like most people, when threatened by an authority figure with a gun, will approve whatever data that person asks for.
It's not supposed to be a foolproof solution. The point is to prevent the officer from casually looking through your photos/texts after you gave him the phone.
The solution to that is a plastic card that has none of that info.
A pretty common way to get a fake id is to borrow a real id from someone else. Bouncers ask you how old you are or what your house number is as a check on that.
That seems like a plausibly useful feature, or are there other ways to tell that the virtual id matches the real person holding the phone?
Is this common, though? In my 18 years of legally entering bars, that has literally never happened to me, even when I was in my early 20s.
The barcode at the back of a physical license card has all sorts of information that may not be printed at the front. For example, for noncitizens in the US it can have some information about visa status.
If there is a standard (name, DOB, photo, address, height, weight) that's probably more than enough.
As ID to get into a bar, I think minimally they'd need access to your photo too, to ensure you haven't just borrowed (or bought) a phone.
Fair, but that's fine and reasonable, I think. If I'm entering their establishment they're well within their rights to have cameras inside that can take my photo, so giving them access to my ID photo doesn't sound like a big deal to me.
But it will be bar policy to have your name/address/email info or their reader won’t authenticate you.
I'm perfectly happy not patronizing those establishments.
With the current system, I could easily believe that not all bars scan the barcode for a nefarious reason, but do it just to make it easier to avoid a bad manual reading (different ID layouts per state, darkness making it hard to read, etc.).
With this kind of digital ID, requesting anything more than my age and photo is an immediate flag to me that they're explicitly looking to do something shady (or at least they're incompetent and don't know how to use the reader properly). I would deny everything but the age and photo request, and if they balk, I'd ask to speak to a manager or just walk away.
It should be noted that bars that do scan driver license already abuse the data that they get:
https://idscan.net/scanning-solutions/age-verification-solut...
They use it for marketing purposes.
In both cases, the verifier manually compares the appearance of the individual against a portrait photo, either printed on the plastic or transmitted electronically
So now I have to put my image in the store's database too? Way more invasive than plastic card, which doesn't electronically transmit my image.
This reads a lot like simply another way to tie users up into a smartphone specific Eco-system, not to mention the privacy implications.
There is a much better approach that doesn't have the privacy problems that the proposed solution has:
Use good old PKI with the verification process for generating certificates delegated to suitable third-parties.
What a stupid idea. After a weekend in nature, you now have to worry, you phone still has power to drive a car. And more stupid, hand over my phone unlocked to the police or to everybody who wanna see the license. More worse, until now, they just checked and it was ok. From now an, everybody is always saved after that in a DB. And why is that more secure? If you cheated until know and showed a false ID, so you show now just a false phone.
> _After a weekend in nature, you now have to worry, you phone still has power to drive a car_
Who doesn't have a charging cable in their car for their phone?? Also if you're going to be in nature for a weekend, you can opt to carry your physical ID as a backup (or leave it in the car if you're comfortable with that).
> _hand over my phone unlocked to the police or to everybody who wanna see the license._
The article covers this. You never hand over your phone; you send a grant to the other party's device to read only certain bits of information from the ID app. And the article mentions that the right way to implement it on the ID-holder's side is to require PIN/biometric unlock in order to approve the transfer, but then immediately go into a lockdown mode so if the LEO then takes your phone, it'll be locked.
> _More worse, until now, they just checked and it was ok. From now an, everybody is always saved after that in a DB._
That already happens now; if you get pulled over, the cop isn't going to manually read your ID and copy it into their squad car's computer. They scan the barcode on the back and all of it gets sucked in. (Even many bars and convenience stores that sell alcohol will scan the barcode and get way more information than they need.)
> _And why is that more secure? If you cheated until know and showed a false ID, so you show now just a false phone._
Sure, you can borrow someone else's phone, but presumably your photo won't match theirs. And if it's close enough, then yeah, you can probably get away with it. But just because something doesn't close all the loopholes, it doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. A discouragement for this particular thing is that the person you've borrowed the phone from will probably not want to give up their phone for an entire night!
Personally, I'm torn on this. If it really would allow me to selectively give only the bits of information from my ID that various parties actually need, that would be nice. But I worry more about how the ID data will be secured on whatever non-government third-party's backend this will inevitably be outsourced to.
> so you show now just a false phone
You'd be sending a message cryptographically signed by the government to someone else's device, so it doesn't matter what's on your screen—if you can't produce that signed message, you can't do anything.
The thing that kills me is the fact that if you are driving your own car, the police already know who you are and if you have a license when you get pulled over. The whole requirement to have a card on you is bogus bullshit, and only serves to make you a criminal if you happen to forget it.
If you drive the car of a person who has a suspended license, you will get pulled over. Their ALPR system will automatically flag you, and the officer will tell you that he ran your plates and pulled you over because the owner has a suspended license. That might be a good time to have a physical ID on you to prove you're not the owner. BUT at the same time, if you know your DL number, or even your name and address, there's no reason the cops can't look you up to verify who you are.
> _The thing that kills me is the fact that if you are driving your own car, the police already know who you are and if you have a license when you get pulled over. The whole requirement to have a card on you is bogus bullshit, and only serves to make you a criminal if you happen to forget it._
It seems pretty common to loan a car to a friend, or to use a car registered to another family member, or to rent a car form either a traditional rental company or a service like Turo. In those instances they have no idea who you are.
> _If you drive the car of a person who has a suspended license, you will get pulled over. Their ALPR system will automatically flag you, and the officer will tell you that he ran your plates and pulled you over because the owner has a suspended license._
I don't find that unreasonable at all. And that's a fine counterexample to your original complaint; in this case it's good that you have a license that you can produce to prove you're not the owner with the suspended license.
> _BUT at the same time, if you know your DL number, or even your name and address, there's no reason the cops can't look you up to verify who you are._
There are all sorts of ways to defeat that. Perhaps you give your sibling's name and address, and your photos look close enough that you get away with it. And why would I bother to memorize my DL number? It's far easier to just carry the card.
These sorts of systems and processes are designed to avoid loopholes and make things more certain for the cop. Asking a cop to "just trust you" based on self-provided information also just begs them to decide based on their unconscious (or conscious) biases, which reduces justice for anyone who happens to be a member of an often-discriminated-against group. I think cops _should_ try to be flexible and give people the benefit of the doubt when it's appropriate to do so, but deciding when that's the case isn't always easy, so I'd rather we just require people to carry their license with them when they drive. It's not hard, and if you're going to be assuming responsibility for a one-ton metal and plastic ballistic object traveling fast enough to kill, then you damn well can also take on the responsibility for carrying a physical license.
Regardless, out of all the things that the government does that's shady and reeks of wanting to control people's lives, requiring you to carry around a little card with you when you drive a car is not even in the top 100 for me.
Are we seriously looking at the possibility of handing over _control_ of government-issued driver licenses to a private for-profit entity whose main way of making money is by monetizing citizen data? _For real?_ Like many others here, my immediate thought upon reading this was, "W.T.F.?"
"In some cases, this means you may get advertising in the mail"
It's nice to know Google is concerned about this dystopian possibility.
Neat. Glad to see this heading to release. I represented Google at a few of the ISO meetings years back before another team took over.
In India this has been a thing for a while now. Just that it is provided by the central Govt itself -
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You can keep many Govt issued IDs in there and those are all good to be accepted and treated as valid across the country - for example DL and vehicle ownership docs when checked by cops. You can keep some non Govt IDs as well e.g. insurance docs.
I do have some privacy/safety concerns but I'd trust my Govt (that issued most of these docs in the first place) more than a corporation who are known as a business with privacy invasion as their primary function - in fact almost anything they do revolves around this core idea.
I like this idea in theory, but... I wonder if the mDL apps can be generic enough that you can implement one and load a credential from any issuer into it, or if it's going to be a single (probably proprietary) app per issuer.
This is something I'd like to be able to use on non-Android and iOS platforms, but that's unlikely if it's not possible for anyone but the issuer to write an mDL app.
Ha ha, no. No way in hell am I ever letting an image, facsimile, or digital token version of my driver's license on a Google-controlled platform. I'd sooner xerox it and stick it on a sign in my front yard.
Perhaps governments should require phone manufacturers to provide security updates for at least 5 years, otherwise you can throw your smartphone out of a moving car every two years to keep your driver license secure.
“Sorry sir, I accidentally knocked your phone out of your hands and stepped onto it. Now, can you show me your driver’s licence please sir?”
(Yes I know other forms of licences are fallible, I’m just being cynical).
This is a very US-centric approach to set a standard for having your ID on your phone. Why not calling it simply Mobile ID and having the driver license as one of the data records or features? That would be more natural design.
Yeah, I did think it was kinda weird (even as an American) that this is presented as a digital driver's license and not just a digital ID.
It's possible that they are afraid the latter will raise more "big brother" type concerns with people in the US, so they're focusing on the DL part of it.
I know people who don't have a DL, and instead have a (nearly identical looking, also obtained from the same government agency that handles DLs) state ID, and it would be silly if this new "mDL" didn't also support their IDs.
It's an ISO standard for a driver's license and the US isn't the only party involved in it (although it may be unique in that it plays the role of a national ID there).
I would like this better if it included ID that blind and low vision people use to substitute for licenses. I don’t like that this plan seems to lock out proof of identity services for people with disability by design.
I know this is a real problem because I can hardly see. I don’t have a license. It causes continuous problems in real life.
I live in Oz. You are supposed to be able to use a “Photo Card” to prove identity the same as a drivers license. It takes the same amount of proof to get a “Photo Card” from the government as a drivers license. They look the same as a drivers license, even the same holograms, but a different colour.
But I have continuous trouble dealing with banks, insurers, government (crazy!), post office, telephone companies, internet companies. I bought a passport mostly because it easier to carry that around.
If we get an app that only accepts drivers license and not the official photo card equivalent it means we’ll get told by contact centres to drive (!) to our nearest branch of whatever and bring a folder full of ID and hope the drone will accept it.
" For additional protection, mDL apps will have the option of both requiring user authentication before releasing data and then immediately placing the phone in lockdown mode, to ensure that if the verifier takes the device they cannot easily get information from it."
That's an interesting feature. I wonder if it's going to result in pressure from law enforcement to unlock the device.
It will be interesting to see how teenagers hack this to fake the "are you over 21 signal?" in order to get alcohol while underage.
They can use someone else's phone/smartwatch.
The image would still need to match
A rather common joke that I've seen on social media and also have personally witnessed in real life is that within the US, the person making the comparison is of one race and has difficulty accurately comparing a person of a different race with the picture supposedly of that person.
Consequently, two people who don't really look alike can essentially share the same ID card as the person doing the comparing doesn't want to invite accusations of racism.
Would there be any way for similar protections to come to digital auto insurance cards?
Why would you need that? Insurance cards have zero security on them anyways. There's no standard format for paper cards as is is. All I have ever had is a piece of paper that I ran off on my printer, and it says "EVIDENCE OF INSURANCE" in Times New Roman and lists off a bunch of crap that the police can't verify. Some states, having a card is pointless, because if you lose your policy, the state finds out and already has record of it.
I would like the same ability to transmit the information with the phone in lockdown, in a way that the police would understand due to the system being the same.
It was not a comment about whether cards are standard. I do need to be able to present a policy number the police look up in my state.
In Hawaii, insurance cards are printed on special paper and must be mailed by your insurer. Printed PDFs or copies aren't accepted.
No. Nope. No. No. No. There's _nothing_ wrong with plastic card drivers' licenses. Don't fuck up and complicate a system that already works perfectly.
I don't want my identity in society controlled by a fucking Google app. I don't know when they'll lock me out. I don't know if I'll always have a working, charged smartphone on me. I don't see a single advantage to this approach.
Perfectly? Hardly. Why does a random bar or liquor store get to scan the barcode on my license and get my name, address, and phone number that they can sell to a third party?
Not saying _this_ is the solution, but the current system isn't that great.
And DMV will get, by default, all our contacts, location history 24/7, installed app list, clipboard texts, what more? But of course we as developers will be the first to deny because we know how to disable most of that. And 10 years from now, Facebook will upload everybody’s license by mistake, oops. But by that time, DMV will already be selling everything for a couple of dollars. And everybody will say well, nothing illegal was done. But of course, downvote me, everything I’ve said is speculation and we are so smart that we’ll never let that happen