In my (European) country now we can have a digital copy of the driving license on the phone. It specifically says that it’s valid to be presented to law enforcement officers during a check.
I saw amazed in the beginning. They went from limited beta testing to full scale nationwide launch in just two months. Unbelievable. And I even thought “wow this is so convenient I won’t need to take the wallet with me anymore”. I installed the government app and signed up with my government id and I got my digital driving license.
Then yesterday I got stopped by a random roadblock check and police asked me my id card. I was eager to immediately try the new app and show them the digital version, but then because music was playing via Bluetooth and I didn’t want to pause it, i just gave the real one.
They took it and went back to their patrol for a full five minutes while they were doing background checks on me.
That means if I used the digital version, they would had unlimited access to all my digital life. Photos, emails, chats, from decades ago.
What are you are going to do, you expect that they just scan the qr code on the window, but they take the phone from your hand. Are you going to complain raising doubts? Or even say “wait I pin the app with a lock so you can’t see the content?”
“I have nothing to hide” but surely when searching for some keywords something is going to pop-up. Maybe you did some ironic statement and now they want to know more about that.
And this is a godsend for the secret services. They no longer need to buy zero day exploits for infecting their targets, they can just cosplay as a patrol and have the victim hand the unlocked phone, for easy malware installation
Immediately uninstalled the government app, went back to traditional documents.
There’s a good chance they have a Cellebrite in their car and will copy your entire phone’s storage over.
And you’ll get a tinfoil hat as a reward
Yeah because the police using a commercially available and ridiculously cheap device to copy data from your phone is totally unbelievable. I must be the crazy one.
News flash, they’re not FBI tier ultra classified tools anymore, you can find them on eBay for less than $1000. There’s a good chance that’s cheaper than the phone you have right now. You think a police department who is already intent on scrolling through your phone while “checking your ID” wouldn’t just put one in every cruiser?
You think a government can ask a couple of dozen thousand, barely literate goons to do something like this without the word getting out within a week?
Yes, and phones have up to 1000gb of storage nowadays. It’ll take a minute :p
Forensic acquisition tools like Cellebrite take hours to clone storage. Not saying they wouldn’t do it, just saying that legitimate acquisition that can be used against you has to be collected in a very certain way for it to be proof.