Apple announced today that eight US states will soon allow citizens to host their official digital IDs and driver's licenses on Apple Wallets. It sounds incredibly convenient, it will speed up many services but it is really scary for democracy and privacy.
It will give law enforcement a clear and defensible point with which to force you to unlock the phone your. It sounds like it will give prosecutors the reason they need to trample on the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution.
According to the press release:
Driver's licenses and status IDs on Apple Wallet are presented only digitally via encrypted communication between the device and the ID reader, so users do not have to unlock, display or deliver their device.
Sounds good, but it's not.
Police officers in the US use unauthorized uses of it software Palantir and Clearview AI to conduct digital data, spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year in payments to victims of police misconduct, and have special immunity from civil and criminal lawsuits. They have been caught numerous times trying to illegally force citizens to unlock and hand over their phones.
If you trust every police officer in the US, you have nothing to fear.
"You can use your physical ID for the police and your Apple Wallet ID for other things."
There are millions of ways in which police can force a person to unlock their phones. The problem by storing the identity in them, as we have mentioned, is that it gives them a very good reason that sounds legal, but ultimately does not keep the Fifth Amendment.
The more people choose to use the new feature, despite the risk, the more normal the idea will become. Then services and utilities will start appearing that reward citizens for using digital IDs over physical ones.
This is called stratification and is already a huge problem in US government agencies.
Just as we needed net neutrality to ensure that companies supply Internet won't create fast lanes for those who hack it, it's vital to the future of democracy that we don't allow government and big tech companies to have access everywhere.
The article was published on TNW
