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macbr | 1 year ago

I’m confused – my name as written on my passport definitely contains non ASCII characters?

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extraduder_ire|1 year ago

What is it in the machine-readable section at the bottom? My passport takes the apostrophe out of my name down there.

belorn|1 year ago

What is the point of a machine-readable name when there is a machine-readable passport number which should be unique for each issuing country? In this age I would assume that places which uses machines to read passports also are connected to international databases where the unique number is checked for validation. My country also mandated passport with chips in them for the last couple of decades, so by now there are no longer any valid passports without such chip.

If I had to guess, it seems the machine-readable section is just backward compatibility for machines built during the period where people started doing machine reading of passports but had yet to started to put chips into them.

(as a fun side note, smart phones can read the chip on passports and this is then used by some digital identity providers to establish identity on account creation, in combination with the phone camera).

macbr|1 year ago

Oh, yeah. No non-ASCII in the “machine readable” part. Though I’ve never seen anything use that section. My national id card also has a “machine readable” section – but that doesn’t even contain my whole name: It’s just cut off after 20 letters.

Muromec|1 year ago

You probably have ASCII-adjacent name to begin with, so people who can read some kind of language using Latin letters will simply ignore "funny dots and dashes" and pronounce it kinda wrong.

It's on a different level from having a name originally written in a different alphabet entirely. At this point you just have it written in two scripts, with second being ASCII.