Apple today announced that eight US states will soon allow citizens to host their official digital IDs and driver's licenses in Apple Wallets. Sounds incredibly convenient, it will speed things up a lot services but it's really scary for democracy and privacy.
It will give law enforcement a clear and defensible point by which they will force you to unlock your phone. It sounds like he will give prosecutors the reason they need to trample on the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution.
According to the press release:
Driver's licenses and status IDs in Apple Wallet are presented digitally only through encrypted communication between them devices and of the ID reader, so the users they do not need to unlock, display or hand over their device.
Sounds good, but it's not.
U.S. police use unauthorized use of Palantir and Clearview AI software to conduct digital data, spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on payments to victims of police misconduct, and have special immunity from civil and criminal proceedings. They were caught many 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 with storing identity on them, as we mentioned, is that it gives them a very good reason that sounds legal, but ultimately does not comply with 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 internet neutrality to ensure that Internet service providers did not create fast lines for those who crash them, it is vital to the future of democracy not to allow government and big tech companies to have access everywhere.
The article was published on TNW
