I hate this idea. I hate having to depend on my phone. I rarely use it and often let it run out of charge. They can pry my passport from my cold dead hands.
I think the article is poorly titled, as it doesn't mean the end of paper passports. I can't see that happening in my lifetime - we still have checks and credit cards despite most young people just tapping their phone around.
I'm all for digitalizing documents as an option, but not if it means losing physical copies. So far the government has been on the side of not discarding them - we still get paper social security cards.
The reason hard copies of most documents will exist for a long time -- building federated digital systems is a huge pain in the ass.
Sure, you can have a digital passport for purposes of authenticating yourself, which is operated by your national government. Will this government allow the same level of access to the embassy of North Korea or some other geopolitical adversary or just to a random sim card issuing shop in a mall oh the other side of the globe? Maybe they will in the same way corona certificates were implemented. Now will every single place that legitimately needs to have a copy of your id on file be bothered to interface with this system and all slightly incompatible versions of it provided by other governments? Probably not.
And passports are kinda sorta simple to begin with.
The US has checks. Most other nations have mostly (or completely) phased them out for more than 2 decades.
Credit cards are just chip carriers now. Mag stripe is being phased out. So either you use the chip connection or use contactless. The cards issued by my bank (Australia) aren't embossed and the mag stripes will probably disappear once the banking 3rd world (US + some of Asia) catches up with the rest of the world.
Oh and contactless is literally the same protocol as the contact connections, so "just tapping their phone around" is exactly the same (to the terminal) as "just tapping their card around" or "just inserting their card to read".
Government ID could be done in a privacy enhanced way that only provides the requestor attestation of the required information and nothing else.
eg
* "Is this person that just provided an encrypted and unreadable blob from their ID card over 18?" "Yes".
* "Is the person that just provided an encrypted and unreadable blob called John Doe?" "Yes".
The government already has all of your identification from birth to death.
By (mostly) definition, your identification is what your local government says it is.
> we still have checks and credit cards despite most young people just tapping their phone around
Unfortunately we're losing cash. There is one of those modern "chic" mixed-business-and-apartments developments not far from my house. Shortly after they completed construction my 12-year-old daughter visited the ice cream store there with her friends, but she couldn't pay for her ice cream when she got to the register because they didn't accept cash. They ended up just giving her the ice cream.
Most of the restaurants there have a "no cash" policy posted in their windows and at the till. No skin off my back. They're overpriced for what they are anyway, so I'm happy to give my business to other local restaurants not in the fancy mixed-use development.
