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Comment by epsteingpt | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the negative comments.

If you can take a passport picture with your smartphone and get a passport mailed to you in weeks, it will enable many more people to travel, and cut down on bureaucracy and wait times.

It's much better than having papers in archives, will save many errors, and bring government into the 21st century. The information is already in databases, it's just now that it serves the people's convenience.

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I did that last week for my son. Had photo from Walgreens though but rest of the process was quite amazing. This was before the announcement and I may have used state.gov or something ... maybe they had this going on for a while.

Still, much better than how it used to be. You could not do expedited processing but I guess it will come eventually.

Also did not need a login at all which seemed surprising and I did check whether I had gone to a phishing site.

We had our child's photo taken at Walgreen's in his car seat instead of the white reflective backdrop thing they usually use The worker told us "don't worry we can take that out." I was pretty interested to see what kind of software they were going to use.

A few minutes later, I look over at the worker's computer and she's manually scrubbing it out around the kid's head with a hard-edge white rectangle tool in something like MS Paint.

The state department didn't mind apparantly.

I did this 4 years ago, it just has a cool font now.

is that something you can do with this website?

Maybe I'm shallow, but I'm going to be suspicious of what "epsteingpt" says that I shouldn't be negative about.

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