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.

  • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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    14 days ago

    Wouldn’t trust a gov app in europe either. But then again i don’t trust any app and have them firewalled at least .

    • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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      14 days ago

      The EU covid app was released on fdroid. I would trust it if it was open source, audited by a third party, and finally made available on fdroid.

      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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        14 days ago

        Ok this has some right for existence… Yet,just being oss isn’t always the point alone. Without checking the code myself I still just have to trust.

        • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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          13 days ago

          Fortunately fdroid does some checks. And the third party audit does some checks. Thats already a lot of others checking it.

          • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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            13 days ago

            Sure, but it’s still just trusting others. Ok,maybe it’s just my paranoia speaking…