There are significant downsides to the digitalization of travel documents. The biggest one I can think of is ownership - the UK is moving to an entirely digital visa system and bringing in an ESTA style system called ETA for visa free countries. Unfortunately this means that residency cards for noncitizens are being phased out. This means that when the Home Office messes up and accidentally deletes your immigration status, or you are at an airport with no internet access, you have no evidence whatsoever of what status you hold. It also means you will no longer be in possession of any records that might be useful years in the future when the current database containing immigration records will likely have been replaced. It’s much easier to keep a piece of paper around for 30+ years than it is to make sure a digital record doesn’t rot in that time.
I feel strongly that any future digital travel credentials that are offered by governments should be able to operate entirely offline, and provide records that can be retained by the data subject. That means that revocation is harder, but IMO that’s a tradeoff that is worth making to avoid another Windrush scandal.
This has already become a pain when dealing with countries that don’t stamp passports, because when you need to apply for something that asks for your travel history over the past 10 years, you might not have any records anymore.
One reason I dislike such digital ID schemes because I can't actually tell what information (or metadata) is being forked over. Even if it does purport to show me, I'm just supposed to trust what it says?
No thank you. A piece of paper provides a common format that's easy for both me and the official inspecting it to understand.
Most comment here are not related to the problem, which is your interest & my interest & interest of 98% of HN others at least conflicting with the interest of those who control how humans vote. We know how things ought to be if everyone wanted them to be good for most humans. None of this discussion will however convince anyone to work more altruistically in reality.
Those who control the public opinion know that there's some opposition who confuses the problems with the conflict. They laugh since no one who thinks legislation like in the link would be generally bad can do anything. The ignorant will vote what the Orwellianishly-named "smartphone" will command them.
In the next five years, it's likely the option to stab the kings will be for the first time removed, since robotic militias will mean no insurance CEO can simply be shot. This means there will be zero limits to what cruelty they'll do you, since no matter how torturous it gets you'll be unable to even violently resist this. You'll have no democratic mouth, but you must scream. Completes cyberpunkization well.
---
Aside: US drones + US satellites that enable global connectivity of drones was a rather obvious consequence of Starlink ~4 years ago. If they really want some person, they now can search most of Earth in few hours with the drones + computer vision, and soon with land robots, all connected through Starlink (starshield to use the euphemism). The irony is how this at the same time solves the connectivity problem.
Then, the digital passport's ship has already sailed for better or for worse, and all these questions are solved in other ways.
> when the Home Office messes up and accidentally deletes your immigration status
You're toast either way, because it will be checked at the airport. You'll have to deal with the immigration officer and have them do something, because you won't go very far with just a paper that will be checked against the backend. In my experience it has already been the case for a while now.
You still better have the reference paper that will help identify your visa procedure, dates etc. But it's already just a key to the info in the DB.
> you will no longer be in possession of any records
Print out the papers and keep track of the important pieces. It's the same for everything else in your life, including tax documents, birth certificates etc.
Even in the olden days, the papers you had only had value against the agency's record that could prove their validity. If you had to prove residency in some specific period, having a stamp on your passport would mean very little if the agency denied having any records of it. So it's exactly the same weight as if you printed out a certificate while the DB blew out and no data about it are left.
PS: I think in previous time people were also so much more lenient. It wasn't much a question of physical papers or not, and more on how much few people cared if your info was valid or not. I had an error in my name in many official documents, and while people noticed it, a simple "they typed it wrong" explanation was enough in 99% situations.
> That means that revocation is harder, but IMO that’s a tradeoff that is worth making to avoid another Windrush scandal.
I don't think the UK (Or US, other other European) government are too torn up about the possibility of another Windrush scandal.
But I generally agree with you. A physical passport offers a degree of psychological and real "security" that the promise of some cloud-hosted credential absolutely does not.
As a minor aside, I (US citizen) was once able to able to enter the US (at Toronto Pearson airport) despite having left my passport in some hotel. I just told the stern American guy "Yo soy American." Apparently they have ways of telling.
As a Brit with NZ permanent residency, there hasn't been residency stickers in passports for NZ residency for years now, so the only thing I have is a number and a PDF I can print out...
As soon as the local banks here started the push of 'you'll be locked out of your account if you dont activate our App' I switched to a dumb-phone. Tech has turned against us, and as a developer I feel very sad about that.
I strongly believe that a smart-phone should not be a requirement to partake in society.
Something as basic and important as a passport should not be entrusted to these ad-phones. Same with the push for smart-phone fintech / digital currency, or card-only retail. The 'easy option' seems to cost us more and more freedoms.
'This app requires permission to access your passport details. This is only to confirm your date of birth, and thus your eligibility to access the ad infested internet'
Having ranted about all that, I have to say that requesting a new UK passport last month was The best website experience I have had in a very long time. Simple UI, clear process, and worked perfectly without needing the latest nightly build of whatever new browser API / GB framework is the monthly fad. Just a shame it is quite ugly compared to the previous European one.
>I strongly believe that a smart-phone should not be a requirement to partake in society.
I'm 40; I stopped using email in 2016 (save temp-burners for a few necessary signups); essentially never do I carry a cellular phone, nor do I app/text.
My bank treats me like a criminal, locking me out of online banking; occassionally they cancel my debit card ("didn't you see our app notification?!"). Jokes on them, though: I live one block away from this bank, so I just walk in constantly to ask them for account balances/transactions, and to poke fun at their ideas of security (e.g. text 2FA, which login.gov specifically declares "bad practice").
It's actually kind of nice, having built rapore with a few of the tellers who already know why I'm visiting their location so often: bad company policies, dependant upon smartphone apps.
Should physical identification ever be legislated out of existance, I'd probably just expatriate (at this point, semi-retired).
Instead of replacing passports with apps, in between would support passport cards. Better to allow using national ID cards as passports. The digital data could be saved on card but with physical photo and info as backup. It also works for people without smartphone.
The US has passport cards but they only work for land and sea from Canada, Mexico, and Caribbean countries.
Recent Canadian passports are basically a plastic card glued to the first page of a paper passport. For backwards compatibility it seems - it’s obvious the plastic card contains the chip and everything that matters.
National ID cards are widely used for international travel in Europe. You just need to standardize them, so that every checkpoint doesn't have to support 200 weird national standards.
i don't even know if it would work for majority of Mexico tbh. Around covid time, especially in non-Cancun airports, they would basically refuse to let me leave the country if the stupid physical entry stamp was not perfectly readable. Explain to them the digital revolution.
Other than standardizing on equipment and root certificates, none of this is new technology.
The challenge is how do you revoke a certificate which was used to issue millions of ID cards/passports once it leaks? Does everybody suddenly not have a "valid" ID proof?
Or how do you scale non-digitized operations up on-demand once some of this fails?
When it comes to privacy, government can even not keep any of the PII in a central place: it just needs to get it for signing and never needs to store it.
Basically, you can have a device that wirelessly transmits government-signed data containing your facial data and other PII, and upon validation, that data would be used for facial recognition and ID verification.
I've been in a handful of places where no meaningful digital proof of identity/legal entry could possibly be produced: deserts, small towns with no cell service, etc. It's hard to imagine the expectation of a physical passport with a physical stamp in it going away anytime soon in these places.
Since I run GrapheneOS on a Google-less Pixel phone, I can't install airline apps. So what I typically do is use my web browser to check in for my flight and get a PDF of my boarding pass, then I take a screenshot of the QR code.
The last time I did that the TSA scanner was able to read the QR code just fine, but the tablet app that the flight attendant was using at the gate couldn't read it for some reason. After about 10 seconds of fidgeting with the tablet they asked me what my name and seat number was. I told them, and after checking the list they let me through onto the plane. It looked like they tapped around in the app to override the QR code scan or something.
Fast-forward 20 minutes, and we don't push back from the gate when it's time to depart. After another 5 minutes of delay they got on the PA system and said something about the passenger count being off and that the airline's headquarters wouldn't authorize departure until they figured that out. At one point about half an hour into this a flight attendant walked over to my seat and leaned over to adjust the air flow thingy, which I thought was a super weird and random thing to do. In all it took nearly an hour of everyone sitting on the plane at the gate before they figured it out and authorized departure.
I actually have no idea where the breakdown was, because this happened at the gate when I flew earlier and it wasn't at all a problem. I presume the flight attendant scanning QR codes at the gate didn't hit the right buttons on their tablet that time. If we're going to rely on peoples' completely random personal devices to track authorization to travel, our systems need to be a lot better than this. Exceptions to whatever they think should be the "typical" flow should be straightforward and streamlined.
In the meantime since they've gotten rid of kiosks in my local airport I guess I'll be going to the front desk every time and ask for printed boarding passes.
I remember a sci-fi short story from a long time ago where everything that defined you as a person was digitized and available in your smartphone. The story was about a person loosing his smartphone and coming into all kinds of admin horror to regain his identity but eventually ended up broke sleeping under the bridge..
It's probably not that, but there's a sci-fi novel "The Age of the Pussyfoot" by Frederik Pohl, in which one of the key technologies is a device that everybody carries on their belt that is described thus:
> The remote-access computer transponder called the "joymaker" is your most valuable single possession in your new life. If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library, and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker.
The protagonist eventually finds out from personal experience that people who do not have those things (e.g. because they can't afford them) are basically social outcasts, not the least because they can't hold most jobs, or even look for one. But even beyond that, not having the device means that you aren't being tracked means that you can e.g. be murdered without much of a consequence. And so people who can't afford the real thing still shell out money for a mockup of a joymaker to carry on the belt, just so they aren't obvious targets.
The most interesting thing about that novel is that it was published in 1969, long before cellphones or "the cloud" were a thing. A rare case of a sci-fi author taking a contemporary hot bleeding edge tech (remote time-sharing terminals for mainframes) and correctly extrapolating it into the future. Pohl even gave a broadly correct timeframe when he talked about the novel:
> I do not really think it will be that long. Not five centuries. Perhaps not even five decades.
I feel like this was my last week. Welcome to the UK as an American tech worker. You use a custom Android ROM, too bad, you can't setup your visa. Want to book something on Ryan Air too bad, "computer says no" (really I should never do this again for many reasons).
The level of expectation that your phone is a set of handcuffs that you do not own is high. If you own your device and not vice versa, things just don't work in this world. And honestly why would I want a computer that I didn't control anyway?
Google working to build web standards to let companies demand & verify state issued credentials too. This feels like such a scary scary step for the internet, letting companies demand strong verification.
Normally a huge fan of a bigger web platform, but will control, coral, and track users and that's a #rfc8890 violation of very high degree.
I wonder if we can have both, the checking being done digitally. While still having an actual stamp on the paper passport. I know this sounds absurd but I dislike everything digital with no real, physical record I can keep.
If so I'm going to be the one asshole who presents the document on my laptop just because I don't believe that people have the right to invite themselves onto my phone.
New technology in the airport is incredibly scary. I recently flew between the United States and Canada and it is mind boggling how trivial passports are already becoming. I began by looking into a camera on a kiosk, where as soon as my face was recognized, I walked up to the CBP officer and he verified my identify with a quick look at my passport and ticket. I don't see the passport lasting much longer, at last in the US, Canada, and Europe.
Everyone here is freaking out but here are a few things from my experience:
1. There is very little to no chance that all the governments in the world are going to cooperate to create a centralized database about their citizens. Most countries don't want to do it and I don't see China or the US doing it anytime soon.
2. The biometric passport is not a paper passport already. The same way the SIM chip disappeared, your "passport" can disappear too.
3. The non-biometric passport will remain valid for at least 20-30 more years. I am talking about these very old passport that only a few handful of countries still issue including the USA (for particular situations). This backward compatibility will mean that the paper passports (even non-biometric!) will remain supported for a very long time.
As soon as you put everything on a single point of failure, it will fail you.
It is not a good idea to have keys, documents, passes, ... all on a smartphone: it can break if dropped, it can be stolen anytime, it can have no battery. Those devices are not good for such important elements of a travel.
Well, not in the UK. Here you need a passport to partake in any significant financial activity - I had to get one to sell my flat, and you need one to open a bank account. Neither of these were needed 20 or so years ago. It's basically introducing ID cards by the backdoor, when the majority of the UK has always been against them (but civil servants and politicians love them). And all under the nebulous reason of "preventing money laundering".
I have to say though that the guy I spoke to at the Passport Office (a civil servant!) was very nice, and they did git it to me quickly. Never used it again 4 years later, though.
"Digital only" is a truly terrible idea for passports, currency and everything else. Even if everything worked perfectly (it never does) and all the databases were completely secure (they aren't), what happens when there is a power outage? What happens when the network goes down? What happens when you drop your phone in the toilet? In a perfect world nobody in a position of power would be remotely stupid enough to suggest going all digital for anything critically important, yet here we are.
When I was traveling in London in 2018 I was barely able to pay for the groceries I needed in order to eat that night because I was checking out just as the global VISA outage started happening.
The machine took a long time to process my payment, but after a couple of attempts it managed to go through. As I left the store I noticed a long line forming for the self-checkout registers, and nobody else was able to get their payments to go through. There was apparently no option to fall back to cash at that store.
Whenever I travel now one of the bits of research I do now is to make sure I have a plan for getting basic necessities like food and shelter should an electronic payment system outage like that happen again.
I've repeatedly wished for a mechanism integrated into a phone that allows displaying one or more documents (e.g. QR codes, tickets, some other form of document to be displayed) while having the phone otherwise locked (in lockdown mode, so a password is required to unlock it). That would make it much safer to display a QR code on your phone without the net effect of having your phone unlocked when going through security.
Until then, I'll continue to print such things out on paper.
Why until then? Print in any case. It is an excellent way to have all of your important travel documents separate from your smartphone. Use you smartphone as the backup, not the other way around.
In response, I've stopped traveling to surveillance states or high (in)security states. I'm unwilling to participate in a society where I am expected to produce ID when walking down the street or can be accused of vague pseudo-crimes like being, "suspicious looking".
I know my boycott won't mean much to those who are willing to put their entire lives onto their personal tracking devices. Maybe it even seems unreasonable to those who are accustomed to complying with testicular exams at the airport. That's totally fine. I'm not here to convince them of my principles. We all have different values.
The point is I can leave the house without a device or ID and live a perfectly normal life.
[+] [-] noodlesUK|1 year ago|reply
I feel strongly that any future digital travel credentials that are offered by governments should be able to operate entirely offline, and provide records that can be retained by the data subject. That means that revocation is harder, but IMO that’s a tradeoff that is worth making to avoid another Windrush scandal.
This has already become a pain when dealing with countries that don’t stamp passports, because when you need to apply for something that asks for your travel history over the past 10 years, you might not have any records anymore.
[+] [-] zahlman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rkagerer|1 year ago|reply
One reason I dislike such digital ID schemes because I can't actually tell what information (or metadata) is being forked over. Even if it does purport to show me, I'm just supposed to trust what it says?
No thank you. A piece of paper provides a common format that's easy for both me and the official inspecting it to understand.
[+] [-] Xen9|1 year ago|reply
Those who control the public opinion know that there's some opposition who confuses the problems with the conflict. They laugh since no one who thinks legislation like in the link would be generally bad can do anything. The ignorant will vote what the Orwellianishly-named "smartphone" will command them.
In the next five years, it's likely the option to stab the kings will be for the first time removed, since robotic militias will mean no insurance CEO can simply be shot. This means there will be zero limits to what cruelty they'll do you, since no matter how torturous it gets you'll be unable to even violently resist this. You'll have no democratic mouth, but you must scream. Completes cyberpunkization well.
---
Aside: US drones + US satellites that enable global connectivity of drones was a rather obvious consequence of Starlink ~4 years ago. If they really want some person, they now can search most of Earth in few hours with the drones + computer vision, and soon with land robots, all connected through Starlink (starshield to use the euphemism). The irony is how this at the same time solves the connectivity problem.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|1 year ago|reply
Then, the digital passport's ship has already sailed for better or for worse, and all these questions are solved in other ways.
> when the Home Office messes up and accidentally deletes your immigration status
You're toast either way, because it will be checked at the airport. You'll have to deal with the immigration officer and have them do something, because you won't go very far with just a paper that will be checked against the backend. In my experience it has already been the case for a while now.
You still better have the reference paper that will help identify your visa procedure, dates etc. But it's already just a key to the info in the DB.
> you will no longer be in possession of any records
Print out the papers and keep track of the important pieces. It's the same for everything else in your life, including tax documents, birth certificates etc.
Even in the olden days, the papers you had only had value against the agency's record that could prove their validity. If you had to prove residency in some specific period, having a stamp on your passport would mean very little if the agency denied having any records of it. So it's exactly the same weight as if you printed out a certificate while the DB blew out and no data about it are left.
PS: I think in previous time people were also so much more lenient. It wasn't much a question of physical papers or not, and more on how much few people cared if your info was valid or not. I had an error in my name in many official documents, and while people noticed it, a simple "they typed it wrong" explanation was enough in 99% situations.
[+] [-] hilux|1 year ago|reply
I don't think the UK (Or US, other other European) government are too torn up about the possibility of another Windrush scandal.
But I generally agree with you. A physical passport offers a degree of psychological and real "security" that the promise of some cloud-hosted credential absolutely does not.
As a minor aside, I (US citizen) was once able to able to enter the US (at Toronto Pearson airport) despite having left my passport in some hotel. I just told the stern American guy "Yo soy American." Apparently they have ways of telling.
[+] [-] frutiger|1 year ago|reply
How offline is the current system today, where officers swipe/scan our paper passports into a machine?
[+] [-] pixelesque|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|1 year ago|reply
Canada, at least, already uses an ETA system called exactly that (or I guess TAE in French), so that probably had greater influence than the US ESTA.
[+] [-] acheong08|1 year ago|reply
Airport WiFi - people can easily run deauth with aircrack-ng. Email server might be down Phone out of battery Etc
[+] [-] cyanydeez|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rachelgunn|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] whitehexagon|1 year ago|reply
I strongly believe that a smart-phone should not be a requirement to partake in society.
Something as basic and important as a passport should not be entrusted to these ad-phones. Same with the push for smart-phone fintech / digital currency, or card-only retail. The 'easy option' seems to cost us more and more freedoms.
'This app requires permission to access your passport details. This is only to confirm your date of birth, and thus your eligibility to access the ad infested internet'
Having ranted about all that, I have to say that requesting a new UK passport last month was The best website experience I have had in a very long time. Simple UI, clear process, and worked perfectly without needing the latest nightly build of whatever new browser API / GB framework is the monthly fad. Just a shame it is quite ugly compared to the previous European one.
[+] [-] ProllyInfamous|1 year ago|reply
I'm 40; I stopped using email in 2016 (save temp-burners for a few necessary signups); essentially never do I carry a cellular phone, nor do I app/text.
My bank treats me like a criminal, locking me out of online banking; occassionally they cancel my debit card ("didn't you see our app notification?!"). Jokes on them, though: I live one block away from this bank, so I just walk in constantly to ask them for account balances/transactions, and to poke fun at their ideas of security (e.g. text 2FA, which login.gov specifically declares "bad practice").
It's actually kind of nice, having built rapore with a few of the tellers who already know why I'm visiting their location so often: bad company policies, dependant upon smartphone apps.
Should physical identification ever be legislated out of existance, I'd probably just expatriate (at this point, semi-retired).
[+] [-] HeatrayEnjoyer|1 year ago|reply
None of my banks or credit card companies have any app requirement like that.
[+] [-] ddingus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ianburrell|1 year ago|reply
The US has passport cards but they only work for land and sea from Canada, Mexico, and Caribbean countries.
[+] [-] loloquwowndueo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jltsiren|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] twelve40|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] necovek|1 year ago|reply
The challenge is how do you revoke a certificate which was used to issue millions of ID cards/passports once it leaks? Does everybody suddenly not have a "valid" ID proof?
Or how do you scale non-digitized operations up on-demand once some of this fails?
When it comes to privacy, government can even not keep any of the PII in a central place: it just needs to get it for signing and never needs to store it.
Basically, you can have a device that wirelessly transmits government-signed data containing your facial data and other PII, and upon validation, that data would be used for facial recognition and ID verification.
(Like JWT tokens for those familiar with them)
[+] [-] woodruffw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] steelframe|1 year ago|reply
The last time I did that the TSA scanner was able to read the QR code just fine, but the tablet app that the flight attendant was using at the gate couldn't read it for some reason. After about 10 seconds of fidgeting with the tablet they asked me what my name and seat number was. I told them, and after checking the list they let me through onto the plane. It looked like they tapped around in the app to override the QR code scan or something.
Fast-forward 20 minutes, and we don't push back from the gate when it's time to depart. After another 5 minutes of delay they got on the PA system and said something about the passenger count being off and that the airline's headquarters wouldn't authorize departure until they figured that out. At one point about half an hour into this a flight attendant walked over to my seat and leaned over to adjust the air flow thingy, which I thought was a super weird and random thing to do. In all it took nearly an hour of everyone sitting on the plane at the gate before they figured it out and authorized departure.
I actually have no idea where the breakdown was, because this happened at the gate when I flew earlier and it wasn't at all a problem. I presume the flight attendant scanning QR codes at the gate didn't hit the right buttons on their tablet that time. If we're going to rely on peoples' completely random personal devices to track authorization to travel, our systems need to be a lot better than this. Exceptions to whatever they think should be the "typical" flow should be straightforward and streamlined.
In the meantime since they've gotten rid of kiosks in my local airport I guess I'll be going to the front desk every time and ask for printed boarding passes.
[+] [-] fredski42|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] int_19h|1 year ago|reply
> The remote-access computer transponder called the "joymaker" is your most valuable single possession in your new life. If you can imagine a combination of telephone, credit card, alarm clock, pocket bar, reference library, and full-time secretary, you will have sketched some of the functions provided by your joymaker.
The protagonist eventually finds out from personal experience that people who do not have those things (e.g. because they can't afford them) are basically social outcasts, not the least because they can't hold most jobs, or even look for one. But even beyond that, not having the device means that you aren't being tracked means that you can e.g. be murdered without much of a consequence. And so people who can't afford the real thing still shell out money for a mockup of a joymaker to carry on the belt, just so they aren't obvious targets.
The most interesting thing about that novel is that it was published in 1969, long before cellphones or "the cloud" were a thing. A rare case of a sci-fi author taking a contemporary hot bleeding edge tech (remote time-sharing terminals for mainframes) and correctly extrapolating it into the future. Pohl even gave a broadly correct timeframe when he talked about the novel:
> I do not really think it will be that long. Not five centuries. Perhaps not even five decades.
[+] [-] dmwilcox|1 year ago|reply
The level of expectation that your phone is a set of handcuffs that you do not own is high. If you own your device and not vice versa, things just don't work in this world. And honestly why would I want a computer that I didn't control anyway?
[+] [-] jorgesborges|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] shrx|1 year ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_My_Tears,_the_Policeman_S...
[+] [-] oniony|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jauntywundrkind|1 year ago|reply
Normally a huge fan of a bigger web platform, but will control, coral, and track users and that's a #rfc8890 violation of very high degree.
Digital Credentials API: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...
[+] [-] ksec|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] conartist6|1 year ago|reply
If so I'm going to be the one asshole who presents the document on my laptop just because I don't believe that people have the right to invite themselves onto my phone.
[+] [-] Havoc|1 year ago|reply
It’s a little disconcerting because you’re literally one „computer says no“ incident away from not being able to return to your own bed.
Literally zero paperwork was issued to fall back on so you’re entirely dependent on a DB server somewhere
Probably going to get a UK passport too just to manage risk. (Already qualify)
[+] [-] anonymouscaller|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|1 year ago|reply
1. There is very little to no chance that all the governments in the world are going to cooperate to create a centralized database about their citizens. Most countries don't want to do it and I don't see China or the US doing it anytime soon.
2. The biometric passport is not a paper passport already. The same way the SIM chip disappeared, your "passport" can disappear too.
3. The non-biometric passport will remain valid for at least 20-30 more years. I am talking about these very old passport that only a few handful of countries still issue including the USA (for particular situations). This backward compatibility will mean that the paper passports (even non-biometric!) will remain supported for a very long time.
[+] [-] jmclnx|1 year ago|reply
1. I get a Free Smart Phone for use for this
2. The service is Free
Passport books have a 1 time fee and for 10 years in the country I live in. I expect the same for Phone use.
[+] [-] gregoriol|1 year ago|reply
It is not a good idea to have keys, documents, passes, ... all on a smartphone: it can break if dropped, it can be stolen anytime, it can have no battery. Those devices are not good for such important elements of a travel.
[+] [-] zabzonk|1 year ago|reply
I have to say though that the guy I spoke to at the Passport Office (a civil servant!) was very nice, and they did git it to me quickly. Never used it again 4 years later, though.
[+] [-] dghlsakjg|1 year ago|reply
Presumably the 15% of UK residents who have no passport are still able to identify themselves somehow...
[+] [-] mrshadowgoose|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pwdisswordfishz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] StanislavPetrov|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] steelframe|1 year ago|reply
When I was traveling in London in 2018 I was barely able to pay for the groceries I needed in order to eat that night because I was checking out just as the global VISA outage started happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa...
The machine took a long time to process my payment, but after a couple of attempts it managed to go through. As I left the store I noticed a long line forming for the self-checkout registers, and nobody else was able to get their payments to go through. There was apparently no option to fall back to cash at that store.
Whenever I travel now one of the bits of research I do now is to make sure I have a plan for getting basic necessities like food and shelter should an electronic payment system outage like that happen again.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|1 year ago|reply
Until then, I'll continue to print such things out on paper.
[+] [-] criddell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Freak_NL|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|1 year ago|reply
Additionally, passports don't need to be charged.
[+] [-] palmfacehn|1 year ago|reply
I know my boycott won't mean much to those who are willing to put their entire lives onto their personal tracking devices. Maybe it even seems unreasonable to those who are accustomed to complying with testicular exams at the airport. That's totally fine. I'm not here to convince them of my principles. We all have different values.
The point is I can leave the house without a device or ID and live a perfectly normal life.