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Comment by manderley | Hacker News Reader

What's so dystopian about it? Is this just the weird Anglo-Saxon cultural thing of ID cards being way worse than passports and state IDs for incomprehensible reasons?

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Because increasingly, we don't own or control our phones. Carriers can push any software they like to it, or can be compelled to. Operating system vendors can add, remove or edit features that can restrict our freedoms or for pernicious purposes. App developers have had free reign over tracking our use, despite changes to the rules from big app stores. Simply viewing an image or opening an SMS can trigger a remote code execution, giving our device to an attacker who never knew us, saw us, or targetted us.

Everything in your wallet is yours, it doesn't change unless you make the change. No-one can decide what the contents do or what they are, how they watch you or report your behaviour. The contents of a wallet are free.

>Because increasingly, we don't own or control our phones. Carriers can push any software they like to it, or can be compelled to. Operating system vendors can add, remove or edit features that can restrict our freedoms or for pernicious purposes. App developers have had free reign over tracking our use, despite changes to the rules from big app stores. Simply viewing an image or opening an SMS can trigger a remote code execution, giving our device to an attacker who never knew us, saw us, or targetted us.

None of that seems to have anything to do with a digital ID.

My understanding of this thread is that it's about phones being our digital IDs, except we don't control them.

I don't think IDs are dystopian but having so much of our identity and information inside expensive closed-source surveillance devices is somewhat dystopian. The happy path works great but the failure modes are a pain in the ass and it's part of why people lose their shit over lost/broken/stolen phones.

Because of the app wants to “un-person” you all they have to do, intentionally or unintentionally is set a flag in a database and now you cease to have an identity.

If you get thrown into the pool with a wallet in your pocket, no big deal. With a cellphone, it’s a $current_iphone_price loss.

Even if phones were $0 people would be upset because it's all the passwords, accounts, login credentials, second factor, photos (are they backed up!?), call history, etc. Too much is tied up in these things.

iPhones are IP68 water resistant.

They're too expensive and stuff on them too important to test that feature. Apple marketing claims they are, so... Anyway I think most of the cases when iphone falls into the water is when it sinks in it forever.

Only before the first battery change.

Dystopia cancelled. /s

Ip68 is a mere 1.5 meters! It’s still a dystopia until we get iso6425.

Maybe you're right, but Apple says the iPhone 15 Pro is safe in up to 6 meters of water for up to 30 minutes

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