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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough, but I don't imagine myself relying on a digital device in order to prove my identity in foreign countries. Drop your phone and break it... then what do you do? And yeah, you can lose your physical passport, but you can also repeatedly stomp on it and even submerge it in water and it will still be useful.

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Instead of stomping on your passport, grab a $30 passport card, useful for ID in non-border contexts abroad (other countries tend to have card shaped national IDs that a passport card can stand in for). No real issues if you lose it; nobody can get into the USA with it, and you can leave your passport in your hotel room

> you can leave your passport in your hotel room

I generally do this anyway; about the only time I carry a passport while just out and about in another country (note: not risky ones) is if making large purchases that will be VAT-refundable. Do merchants accept the card in lieu of passport for verifying you for VAT exemption? Many will take a photo on the phone, but not all.

I used it in South Asia for ID purposes. There’s a lot of going to photocopier businesses to get duplicates of things (gvmt offices won’t do that for you), so it’s nice that middlemen aren’t getting your home address

US passports do not have home addresses or Social Security numbers. Date and place of birth (state, not city) only. Probably not much safer, but there it is.

The article says this is not a replacement for physical passport.

Not useful for much in the real world, but extremely useful for online age verification.

I'm not sure what it actually means. For instance Apple Pay is probably not supposed to replace your actual credit card, but if you can live your life without ever using the physical one, that's just legalese.

If it really doesn't do much (i.e. only help to pass TSA lines), then perhaps it should be called something else. If it effectively can act as a passport in 80%+ more situations, "not a replacement for xxxx" will just be legalese for most users.

Yeah I purely care about whether or not this will get me through TSA. I'm against Apple Pay and all that, but I really don't want to carry (=risk losing) my physical passport just for domestic travel.

You can use a Real ID drivers license for domestic travel, passport is only required when leaving the country.

I don't have a Real ID just cause I don't want to deal with getting one. Was banking on it getting delayed repeatedly until they offer something else.

What else did you imagine?

Either a digital passport like we got around last year, this new Apple Wallet version, or just giving up on the RealID thing

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