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Comment by ezxs | Hacker News Reader

I got it when it was in limited beta. It's underwhelming. First problem is that it's another app on your phone instead of using the Wallet app. It's not clear why you wouldn't just use the Android/Apple app.

The second problem is that even the SFO airport doesn't take them as legitimate IDs.

For the folks who are worried about giving your phone to the cop - I guess I am not worried about it much. The cop has the right to lethal force and probably knows more about the situation when you are stopped than you ever will. So they take a look at your phone? I don't assume they will just take and keep it.

If you need to call your mom, probably best not to call her when the cop is right in front of you. If you need to call your lawyer - you are permitted to do that by law. If you are Googling for what your rights are - you are doing it way too late.

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If you hand the cop your unlocked phone, and they hop over from the ID app to other apps and find evidence they think implicates you in a crime, what happens?

If you hand the cop your phone, and then say “hey I need that back to call my lawyer” and they say “Sorry, no, I need to keep this for processing”, what happens?

There are cases every day where cops are just outright wrong about the law, your rights, or their own department’s policies. The law protects them from being either criminally or civilly implicated in most of those cases, because they’re not expected to be experts in the law. For most purposes, to have a case against a law enforcement officer for violating your rights, you’d need to show that their behavior was so egregious that it was crystal clear they should have known their action was a violation of your rights. And courts have looked very favorably on LEOs historically in this context: things that to a lay person would count as “obvious” have not met that bar.

So while you may, after spending a pile of money, time, and energy, find out that yes, the police officer overstepped, you’ve still been severely impacted by their action.

Yeah better hope you don't get a text message that gets the cops attention while he has your phone. Say... one that happens to contain one of the many hundreds of slang terms for drugs that the DEA maintains https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2018-07/DIR-022-18.p...

"It's not clear why you wouldn't just use the Android/Apple app"

The QR code changes each time you open it. So you can't just screenshot it. I guess that's the same reason why you can't add it to Google wallet.

This feels like a weird pitch. Yes, the way it works right now is that it loads a fresh QR code every time. But that’s a design choice they made, and they could make a different one. We’ve managed to make secure payments work using phone Wallets, and for those, the phone is performing a handshake with the reader as opposed to sending fixed, static credentials. Likewise, when I add an airline ticket to my Wallet, it automatically updates periodically if my gate or flight time change. Why wouldn’t we be able to find a similar solution here?

Not using the Apple wallet app is a huge bummer. I assumed after approval I’d be able to add it to Apple wallet, is that not the case?

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