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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

It is not. Photo quality is low a anyway.

What's important is a controlled process that attaches this photo to a hard-to-forge token, such as a passport or other identity document. It confirms that some designated clerk looked at the photo and at the person, and also at other documents confirming the identity of that person, and maybe asked questions to make sure the person is who (s)he alleges to be.

That photo is for reference only, and is worth next to nothing without the identity verification process above.

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You're talking to the guy that pioneered digital photos used for identification purposes in 1985 (Goodsports, Alphabet BV, Amsterdam).

I think I know a thing or two about the processes involved to get a pass on being allowed to use digital imagery as proof of identity, the one thing that everybody involved from the official side was quite clear on was that any kind of tampering with the image content was absolutely forbidden.

So I would expect this piece of art to have some far reaching consequences.

There's de-facto and de-jure.

Any tampering is forbidden right? Even the transposition of a pixel is forbidden - it's technically illegal, but as long as it doesn't make a difference then I don't think anybody is going to care - so what if this pixel is cyan in this picture and turquoise in the other.

When things are really going to hit the fan is if you are able to have a digitally altered picture that passes the eye test for visual verification but is useless somehow for facial recognition algorithms (altered facial proportions, etc etc). That's a big if, because I don't know much about facial recognition technologies, I'd suspect they're born from machine learning technologies based for human curated results.

Yes, this is correct. And that's exactly what this opens the door to. I suspect this will lead to some changes in the law regarding what route an image should take to be acceptable. It's been converging on this for a long time with ever more strict rules about what can and can not be in the picture. The list of requirements is quite long. It's a small step from there to having the passport office make the photograph.

> Yes, this is correct. And that's exactly what this opens the door to.

I don't quite understand what you mean. I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened. Only if a digitally altered picture can pass both a visual clerk test and facial recognition software will this be considered a problem.

Also, everything is still pointing towards having the passport office make the photograph. Right now post offices do have picture taking facilities - I think that if you just prevented people from taking their own to the post office, or made them take the picture at a place that never let you take possession of the photograph, that would be roughly equivalent. Hardly anybody takes a passport pic at home now, in my experience.

> I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened.

This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity. Even compression artifacts were 'out', this posed some very interesting challenges in controlling the laser printers available at the time to output grayshades (which they really did not want to do), early attempts at dithering did not meet the required standards.

> Hardly anybody takes a passport pic at home now, in my experience.

Interestingly enough, my partner at the company that I worked for in the 80's (and who is technically retired) has just started up a new company to make those pictures with your smartphone.

http://www.photo4id.com/

> This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity

I guess I didn't make my question clear enough which is why that sort of integrity matters. Is it just in response to government legislation that has nothing to do with the usefulness of the ID, or is there some sort of measurable impact on the effectiveness of the ID if that sort of integrity is not followed?

A crappy photograph with no compression artifacts is arguably a worse form of ID than a very well taken image that has compression artifacts. And with an extra layer of lamination and holographic images superimposed across the pictures, why is that allowed but discreet photo manipulation isn't? Is it just that the government doesn't fully understand technology so just knee-jerk bans all of it, or is there an actual basis for the suspicion of such things leading to bad identification?

The integrity matters because anything other than that is considered a falsification. It's a legal requirement, not a technical one. Of course you could flip a LSB in some grayscale image and get away with it. But from a legal point of view you've just done something that is not allowed.

Thank you for answering my question.

It's illegal because the law says that it's illegal, and the law doesn't really have any justification based in fact or actual use-cases, it's just legislation and legislation has a mind of its own.

So this new model might lead to additional legal changes, but the main changes a customer might see is that if the government decides it was wrong and decides on another definition of "falsification" (not likely) or the government doubles down and requires an audit trail of the ID photograph from the taking of the photograph and all devices used to process the photograph.

> It's illegal because the law says that it's illegal

That goes for all laws.

> the law doesn't really have any justification based in fact or actual use-cases, it's just legislation and legislation has a mind of its own.

No, the law is embodying many years of experience with people attempting to forge IDs. So 'tampering' with the inputs to the process is tantamount to forgery, it makes good sense and it draws the lines in an extremely clear and non-ambiguous way. Far better than to leave some vague statements open to interpretation about what manipulation is allowed and what not (fun bit: people asking the service if we can edit out their wrinkles...).

> the government doubles down and requires an audit trail of the ID photograph from the taking of the photograph and all devices used to process the photograph.

In some places they do this, you get a certificate of authenticity with your passport photographs that you have to hand in to the officials.

I've used this company to get passport photos with my phone in the past - http://www.epassportphoto.com

>having the passport office make the photograph

That sounds just fine to me. It's currently a stressful process of trying to follow all the composition requirements and hoping they don't reject it. Might as well have them do it themselves. More work for whoever has to take the photo, less work for everyone else.

Nobody uses pictures for identification. Not alone. In combination with everything else, maybe, but being French, I can even assure you that in most of the cases, people don't even look at your photo when checking your ID. They're always outdated, took in a weird lightning, and with a terrible quality.

From an administration point of view, whether you took a picture of your face and mapped it onto a 3D model, or just gave them the original picture makes zero difference. Last time I renewed my card, I gave them four years old pictures, I looked totally different, and they do not give a damn.

Identification through only a picture was dumb in 1985, and still is.

Whether it is dumb or not does not matter. The facts are that biometric passports with pictures and fingerprints are the law of the land in a lot of places.

That you got away with giving them four year old pictures is good for you, I tried and was refused (and had to go make new pictures). And I haven't changed all that much (the giveaway I guess was that the picture was the same as the one I gave them last time when I applied for a passport).

This is indeed the reason.

When making ID cards for my children, I was too lazy to also apply for a passport at the same time. Applied a few weeks later and the photos got rejected because they were the same as the ID ones. According to the clerk, they can be identical only when both submissions are on the same day.

In the UK, when I renewed my driving license online I was offered the option to have them pick up the photo from my passport record, rather than send in a new photo.

Since the passport had been issued about 9 years before, the new driving license contained a picture already 9 years old (and identical to the passport).

Nearly ten years later (nearing expiry), it therefore contains a photo about 19 years old. I like to think I still look like that youthful person, of course.

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