In my (European) country now we can have a digital copy of the driving license on the phone. It specifically says that it’s valid to be presented to law enforcement officers during a check.
I saw amazed in the beginning. They went from limited beta testing to full scale nationwide launch in just two months. Unbelievable. And I even thought “wow this is so convenient I won’t need to take the wallet with me anymore”. I installed the government app and signed up with my government id and I got my digital driving license.
Then yesterday I got stopped by a random roadblock check and police asked me my id card. I was eager to immediately try the new app and show them the digital version, but then because music was playing via Bluetooth and I didn’t want to pause it, i just gave the real one.
They took it and went back to their patrol for a full five minutes while they were doing background checks on me.
That means if I used the digital version, they would had unlimited access to all my digital life. Photos, emails, chats, from decades ago.
What are you are going to do, you expect that they just scan the qr code on the window, but they take the phone from your hand. Are you going to complain raising doubts? Or even say “wait I pin the app with a lock so you can’t see the content?”
“I have nothing to hide” but surely when searching for some keywords something is going to pop-up. Maybe you did some ironic statement and now they want to know more about that.
And this is a godsend for the secret services. They no longer need to buy zero day exploits for infecting their targets, they can just cosplay as a patrol and have the victim hand the unlocked phone, for easy malware installation
Immediately uninstalled the government app, went back to traditional documents.
Why is nobody mentioning that by installing it and authenticating, there is sweet fuck all you can do to stop them tracking your movements and downloading your whole address book so they can see who you Associate with?
Taking the phone isn’t the problem if they are already in it.
You have to explicitly allow that, at least on android. However, most people hit allow and don’t think anyways :/
Oh nice, no contacts or internal storage stuff!
There are camera and location permissions listed. AFAIK my ID card doesn’t have those.
Camera also means microphone access.
I think that might just be to scan qr codes. And unless you’ve got a very shitty phone, that camera can’t run without the app being active.
You do close your apps, right?
Yeah, I do.
Gud gud
iOS too. Permissions can even be given only while the app is active if it “requires” them, or for location for example an approximate one is sufficient.
Yep, but there was some news about that recently. Apparently their security doesn’t quite work as it should. Perhaps that’s been fixed by now, but then again, Apple does not have a great reputation there.
In most phones it is possible to set permissions (to contacts, locaton, etc) for every app.
Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about all the comments discussed here. Mainly because the governments already have access to everything and I mean EVERYTHING. They will get a subpoena in under a minute if they want to check something regarding your digital life. Not condoning it, just a fact of present life.
There’s limits, largely around the speed and accuracy by which data can be ingested and processed. You can look for everyone somewhere sometimes and someone everywhere sometimes and someone somewhere at any time, but it takes a ton of digital resources to monitor everyone everywhere all the time. For the data to be meaningful it has to be interpreted.
Manned checkpoints allow local state actors to make decisions in near-real time relative to immediately present information. The classic example is someone with a stale warrant or notice on their record. The sheer volume of delinquents makes pursuing every individual troublesome, but as soon as a known offender steps across a checkpoint the police can pounce on the individual offender in that instance. If you’ve got a five year old traffic ticket, a police officer can be in your face about it as soon as they run your ID.
fwiw, my state’s mobile id app doesn’t even ask for the location permission. so maybe some, but it’s not universal