In 8 US states, Apple will begin storing driver’s licenses on the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

In 8 US states, Apple will begin storing driver’s licenses on the iPhone

arstechnica.com

9 pointsaarghh6 comments

Generally speaking, these integrations are tending toward technocratic totalitarianism one small step at a time.

We are ever approaching a reality where a singular device is needed to interact with society in so that you will be logged at every intersection and every acceleration, deceleration and beep of the horn correlated to a psychological profile that is correlated with your health data which adjusts your insurance premiums.

And for what? Because we are too fucking lazy to have a small plastic drivers license in our wallets.

Or maybe I'm just cynical with how things are progressing in countries like Australia.

> a singular device is needed to interact with society

Not only are we racing towards that future extremely rapidly[1], you have described what will happen when everything works correctly! Risk is transitive, so we are also creating a future where those interactions with society stop functioning* if the smartphone/internet features they depend upon fail. (I've written more in a recent comment[2])

[1] I already have frequent problems at the local healthcare center. They already assume everyone has a smartphone and specific brands of video chat. I now have to drive ~30min into a different city if the doctor wants lab tests; their in house Quest franchise de facto requires using your own smartphone to check in! Also, snitching your data to the insurance company has been a standard feature on most CPAP machine for years.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380264

"... a singular device is needed to interact with society in so that you will be logged at every intersection and every acceleration, deceleration and beep of the horn correlated to a psychological profile that is correlated with your health data which adjusts your insurance premiums."

You're literally describing China right now. And look how well that works out for them.

My standard for my phone is that I don't store anything on it that I wouldn't mind seeing on page 2 of the New York Times.

Since my drivers license contains quite some PII, I think I'd rather not have it on my phone ;-) .

Do you need to unlock & handover the phone for verification though?

From what I've read it works similarly to other NFC cards in your wallet, where you just old your phone near a reader. It'll probably work on Apple Watch too, in which case your phone doesn't need to be involved at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com