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Was very excited about this at first but then read a hypothetical realistic scenario someone described.
The cops could get all friendly and say “My handheld scanner doesn’t seem to be working. Would you mind handing over your phone? I’ll just quickly scan on my in-car scanner. Can you please also unlock it so I don’t lose the app? Otherwise I need to file some report for missing documents and we’d need to get a hearing etc. Instead, if you just give me the phone, we’d be done in 5 mins.”

Of course everyone thinks they are not gullible but cops do this for a living. They can word it much better to make it sound convincing.

Pfffft. Cops don’t want your device or your wallet. They only want a physical driver’s license or government issued ID. They don’t want the hassle of being accused of stealing or damaging anything.
 
I must not "get it" but what could you have on your phone that you would be afraid of law enforcement seeing?

Planning a bank heist?
Drug deal?
  1. Financial information that is private - most people don't want others knowing about such information
  2. Your gay contacts if you're in a state that uh, frowns upon such things
  3. Your upcoming trip to a state where you're allowed to have an abortion (sigh)
  4. ....too many other things that are just nobody else's business
This is a question of privacy and human dignity --- it has nothing whatsoever to do with what might or might not be (or should be) legal

The classic "I've got nothing to hide" argument is just total nonsense.

To quote the highly regarded expert on security and privacy, Bruce Schneier (look him up!)

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect
 
You are right, to be honest. It's a slow Friday after a slow news week with many fringe/boring news topics, and so this is a filler story for a more general audience. I wish it didn't come at the expense of upsetting our most dedicated readers who already know every little detail, but there are always tradeoffs involved with publishing content. One thing I have tried to learn over the years is that it is impossible to please everyone. I hope you know that we certainly try our best to balance real-but-boring news with filler-but-popular stories.

Grow thicker skin Rossignol. @Stromos is right. Poor title.
 
Pfffft. Cops don’t want your device or your wallet. They only want a physical driver’s license or government issued ID. They don’t want the hassle of being accused of stealing or damaging anything.
That's naive. As Yogi Berra put it perfectly, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is".

In other words, you are technically correct but in practice it can depend who you are, where you are, what color is your skin (sigh), whether the cop had a fight with his/her partner that morning.....
 
That's naive. As Yogi Berra put it perfectly, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is".

In other words, you are technically correct but in practice it can depend who you are, where you are, what color is your skin (sigh), whether the cop had a fight with his/her partner that morning.....

Hardly naive. It is fact.
 
Well Ohio should be soon, they just launched the ability for us to renew our ID & Driver's License online if you are between the ages of 21-65. And they have added BMV kiosks at Meijer's stores. I was shocked we were even on the list seeing how we are normally the last state to do anything.
 
Not in New York yet? Bastards! 😂 I don’t carry my wallet around anymore. I use Apple pay exclusively now. So no more credit cards. So I have to slide my driver’s license behind my iphone case while I drive. No biggie. But I wish New York was on that list. Maybe someday.
 
That's what I was thinking! You would think Cali would be the FIRST to signup but Nooooooo hhhhh
You do realize California has almost 40 million people, right? Most the states on this list have a small fraction of that. Much easier to implement.
 
Which is a bigger cause for concern because those who DO want to be cops will often not be upstanding citizens respecting your rights.

Often so, and I completely agree it's really a problem. Soon enough, the only people who will be cops will be conscripts.

No civilized society exists today without some sort of law enforcement.

People with talent and critical thinking skills aren't drawn to a line of work that is constantly vilified & ridiculed. Not to mention poor working conditions, high stress, and often poor wages. Some agencies pay well, but the majority don't. I'm sure someone will post the salary of some cop in California or some state police officer who makes bank, but these really are the exception.

If I had a son or daughter, I would do everything I could to discourage them from a career in law enforcement. It's a terrible life. Most young people have no interest in it.

But someone will ultimately have to do the work. It'll either be the worst of the worst (which just makes thing that much harder) or draftees.

Even excellent wages, benefits, and a complete reversal of the beating this line of work has endured (deserved or not) will take decades to fix. In the mean time, society has to live with what we have, and that's getting worse.
 
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Not in New York yet? Bastards! 😂 I don’t carry my wallet around anymore. I use Apple pay exclusively now. So no more credit cards. So I have to slide my driver’s license behind my iphone case while I drive. No biggie. But I wish New York was on that list. Maybe someday.
Then you won't need to carry your ID at a few major airports which will still be the only place that will have the ID readers. It will be a very long time before the ID readers are in all the locations for everyone that needs to check IDs. Nobody will look at an easily modified picture on a phone and accepting it as a valid ID. Every implementation needs the ID readers as the second major part of making this work.

Of course if you are obviously over 65 like I am, there are very very few places that ask for my ID now anyway. Doctors offices like to verify who I am to avoid insurance scams, and my last traffic stop was years ago.
 
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Florida has their own app but it is pretty slow and has to down the data from online every time I login. What if I don’t have a good cell signal. It is made by Thales.
**WILL HAVE

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It’ll be interesting to see how quickly these things are actually adopted. When Apple Pay first arrived, a lot of people hadn’t heard of it outside the tech world but at least you could just hold your phone to the card reader if it was contactless and it would usually work, removing any doubt from the staff member. With digital ID/Driving Licence, it’s effectively your word against theirs if they’ve never heard of it and it’s a situation where you just need to show them some ID without any actual technical ‘transaction’ involved.
It’s fairly straightforward, they either use a digital scanner hooked into this system or they don’t, and if they don’t, you need your physical ID if you want to access a venue, and police departments are quite clearly saying they don’t accept Apple Wallet yet, a few states have their own apps though and they had to update their laws so the police could accept the app as ID. Currently this is TSA only and even that in a few airports nationwide. It’s a very glacial rollout.
 
So the device remains locked even after authenticating with FaceID?

That is, does this intend to say,

"You do not need to unlock, OR show, OR hand over your device" (which is good)

or does it intend to say,

"You do not need to unlock+show" (that is the phone is still going to be unlocked, only that you are presenting it to a machine rather than a person)?

My guess is the latter. The phone is still unlocked when authenticated. This is not safe enough.

Because the concern is that, for example, if the police pulls you over and asks for ID, if you use your phone as an ID, the police might take your entire phone and scan it on his device or even goes back to his car to punch in the info.

It is important to have a way to open the ID while keeping the rest of the phone locked.
In Apple Wallet you do not need to unlock your phone to access cards in your wallet. You can tap the power button 5 times and it will require a passcode to unlock, and then you can tap the power button twice to use Apple Wallet, and the phone will stay locked but you can still use Apple Pay and other Apple Wallet cards.

The one thing is if you point the phone at your face it has a tendency to unlock with FaceID automatically, and the newer the iPhone the faster it unlocks, so that might be something to keep in mind. You can also tap the power button twice before pointing it at your face and it will stay locked while using the Wallet.

There’s also the Apple Watch where you can access Apple Wallet with a double tap on the power button while it’s unlocked on your wrist, but if it leaves your wrist, it will lock automatically.

And no, you don’t show your phone to the officer or hand it over, you scan your phone on the reader, they have the information shown on their screen, it does not use your screen at all and they don’t need to see your phone, nor should they.
 
It’s not a necessity to carry an ID right now…if you are an American citizen you don’t need to carry ID. If the police stop you it doesn’t matter if you have it or not.
 
In many of the states where this has been implemented, the cop would be breaking the law if they took possession of your phone in the process of scanning it. If there gets to be any sort of a problem with cops doing this, presumably civil liberties groups would make a lot of very public noise about it, and cops will get in trouble over it.

And when your drivers license is displayed in iOS, it's via the wallet app, on the lock screen - you have to use TouchID or FaceID to get it to display the license, the phone itself is not unlocked, there's no app that needs to be started up or kept open, and you can't access the other cards in the wallet, only the drivers license. There's not much they can do with it. And, again, taking it out of your hands is breaking the law.

Other hypothetical realistic scenarios include, you get a knock on your door and when you open it, SOMEONE SHOOTS YOU WITH A MACHINE GUN! - therefore, never open your door under any circumstances.

Cops tricking people into doing stupid things is something you cure by (A) enforcement of existing laws against cops and possibly establishment of new laws, and (B) educating the public to not be as gullible. It's not a reason to try to ban a reasonable technological advancement.
This is all good points. It’s the FBI you need to fear and never talk to or give your phone to😉
 
Oh ffs.

Look out, strawmen!
The reverse (and equally ridiculous) list of straw men would be

You drive a truck in a green state, you are pro-life in a state that frowns on that, you have a permit to carry a weapon in state that frowns in that. Absurd and paranoid from either direction. Cops are not looking for that kind of trouble.
 
I don't see CA getting these for another few years. Meanwhile, we were among the first to get those silly digital license plates so I could be wrong.
 
  1. Financial information that is private - most people don't want others knowing about such information
  2. Your gay contacts if you're in a state that uh, frowns upon such things
  3. Your upcoming trip to a state where you're allowed to have an abortion (sigh)
  4. ....too many other things that are just nobody else's business
This is a question of privacy and human dignity --- it has nothing whatsoever to do with what might or might not be (or should be) legal

The classic "I've got nothing to hide" argument is just total nonsense.

To quote the highly regarded expert on security and privacy, Bruce Schneier (look him up!)

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect
I don’t know about you but I just label everyone in my phone as “not gay” just to be safe. 🙄
 
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