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.
In most phones it is possible to set permissions (to contacts, locaton, etc) for every app.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not a fan of those either, but Android offers something called app pinning (or at least GrapheneOS and probably also LineageOS iirc), basically something like retail mode where only one app is accessible and the rest of the device stays locked.
your phone isn’t safe from anyone unless it’s been restarted since last unlocked, and is reasonably new. they have exploits for after it’s been unlocked incl while things are pinned
That’s cute but as a rule when dealing with the government, physical access is root access
I would be more concerned that they would use my credit card. While my phone is unlocked.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that you figured this out. But why did you not consider this sooner? Wouldn’t it have been obvious that you would have to have the phone unlocked and that having a police person have any access to an unlocked device would be a real problem?
What’s obvious to you may not be obvious to other people?
Likewise, what’s obvious to you at one moment may not be obvious to you at another, simply because you’re thinking about the situation from a different angle.
They went as far here in Ukraine as making some services exclusive to those who have the app. The official government app for digital documents and services, Diia, also has stupid integrity check, which makes it unable to be installed from Aurora Store, which makes me cut out from such services, because I don’t have Google Services installed. By the way, there are Google trackers in the app.
Yeah, welfare here is mostly app/phone based. You can technically get around it, but it requires visiting a dwindling number of centres very regularly and waiting in long queues.
The IRS (tax authority) in the US has Google trackers loaded into the DOM including pages listing your Social Security number too, yikes.
Digital licence is all I have used for about 7 years. Police here are careful never to reach for a phone as they can’t legally. You display the licence and give it a shake to animate it and they copy the number down in their notebook. If the police ever did illegally take a phone my force I would wipe it and replace it and lodge a complaint.
They may have similar protections in Europe. People often post opinions on social media without checking facts. I get why on commercial social media where everything is rage bait. But i don’t know why people can’t take a few minutes to check local laws before posting here.
Probably because I live in America but we don’t trust police to not do something just because they’re not supposed to. They do it all the time here.
On iOS you can enable Guided Access and restrict what one can do, for example disable touch and lock it to an app, until you enter a Code. I imagine Android will have something similar.
This obviously doesn’t protect against electronic forensics, but it does protect against just opening different apps and searching through the phone manually.
Yes, Android has app pinning. But they still have access to anything the app gives them.
They can see my ID on the phone. But if they want to take it, then no, I don’t have that ID on me. But then, I live in the US where digital ID isn’t valid.
You can block off certain sections of the screen, or disable touch completely. If all the info they need is on the screen just make it so they can’t tap anything.
It is valid in some states. OP raises an excellent point. I live in the U.S. and have the digital ID on my phone, but I won’t be handling it to law enforcement. I’ll make sure I have the physical copy when I’m driving.
Meanwhile, there’s me who just likes paper versions of this stuff because I like to be able to order a backup hard copy just in case something happens to the first one.
Wait, what? There are countries that let you have multiple valid copies of the same ID??
Sorry, my bad. I meant more stuff like the birth certificate and other vital documents. I really should’ve specified.
(I swear I’m not a dumbass sometimes.)
That stuff becomes a moot point once you have a decently working bureaucratic system (if and when). If you can ask for a digital certificate online, and get it in your email three days later, you’re not too worried about losing a copy.
On the other hand… I swear to you that multiple times, I have had to present “a birth certificate that was less than 6 months old”.
As if the time and circumstances of my birth might have suddenly changed in the last year.
This is the biggest issue I have with them. The only way this will work in modern society where the police can’t be trusted, is if the ID is accessible while the rest of the device is locked down.
And that’s really only possible if Apple and Google integrate that directly into the OS.
It is.
Apole has “guided access”, android has “pin app”.
I only have experience with the latter, it works by opening the task management view, and selecting “pin application” on a running app.
That then locks the device to that app. To access anything else, it has to be unlocked as if the screen were locked.
App Pinning DOES NOT lockdown the device, even if you have it set to require a PIN to unpin, biometrics still work to unlock the device.
It also gives you a warning that personal data may still be accessible and the pinned app can open other apps. It specifically says “Only use app pinning with people you trust”… which is the exact opposite of the use case here. And app pinning is turned off by default, you have go go searching in the settings to enable the ability.
Was definitely on by default on my device.
Personal data is still accessible, if the app you choose to pin is something like the dialer, or your mail app, then yes, you can obviously access contacts and emails. The feature doesn’t block the pinned app from accessing everything it normally accesses.
As for opening other apps, this applies to stuff like links or launchers. If the app has links somewhere, you could open your default browser app. It does not allow you to “escape” the pinned app to anywhere else in the system, unless the pinned app has a way to launch other apps the way launchers do.
The feature could certainly use improvement, but if it were only useful with people you trust, it would be pointless.
It’s obviously intended for situations where you have to let someone use your phone, and don’t want to give them free reign. With people you trust, you wouldn’t need something like that.
It’s far better than nothing, and is in fact part of android.
To add to this, a lot of what keeps us safe is the friction of bureaucracy. Authoritarians cannot micromanage every decision you make or round up every person they want because those actions take time and resources that aren’t infinite. But you can reduce the time and resources required if you make identification more convenient and therefore enforcement more targeted. Maybe now they can justify making you present ID every time you pay cash at Starbucks, buy a backpack, get on a bus, use a bike share, watch hot snuff porn, you name it.
Every country in Europe that has vastly better privacy laws than the US, also already has national ID since forever.
Now they even became electronic biometric IDs, and I still don’t need to show it whenever I buy a loaf of bread.
Even if, why would anyone ever want to bother when they could just track your payment cards?
Not in Australia where it is illegal for the police to touch your phone.
They can compel you to reveal your password without a warrant but can’t touch your phone? Is that a state law?
Dont we have a right to a lawyer and to not self incriminate? Surly they need a court order to compelled u to reveal ur password?
https://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca191482/s3la.html
It does require a court order, but notably you do not need to be suspected of a crime.
Dont we have a right […] to not self incriminate?
Not that I’m aware of, but if you find otherwise, let me know!
It requires a magistrate to issue an order at least. But yeah seems we are fucked. Is there any way one could devise a method to which it is literally impossible for you to provide said information if u dont want? Like could u tie unlocking to somthing they cannot legally compell u to do without violating ur human rights?
That’s a limitation in your countries implementation then. The owner must have full control of what data to present or at least category based requests.
Either have a cheap second hand sim less phone just for that or carry the physical I’d or perhaps a copy of the physical id.
I have the digital id in case i forget my physical one (despite not legaly being required to carry id) but its in an empty graphene os profile.
They don’t need to take your phone with them. They literally can just scan the code, because it sends all the info to their screen, that they were gonna look up anyway.
No way the government implemented an app for this use case. That’s extremely inefficient.
I thought you actually tried, that they took your phone?
Couldn’t these apps also use the Android/iOS’ wallet manager which allows handing it over unlocked while the phone is “closed” (not necessarily locked, though…)?
I don’t know if they could, because they will probably compromise all information into the wallet.
But it’s a good idea. I hope that it can be implemented like you said in a secure way.
Illinois at least passed a law to limit the consent given when using a digital ID with a police officer such that they’re ONLY allowed to use it for ID and not snooping, but that’s the only state to do so.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/should-i-use-my-states-digital-drivers-license
But do you trust them to follow the law? I certainly don’t.
