Starting today, apps made by state and federal governments are getting a new government badge to help users better identify official apps.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14967490

Starting today, apps made by state and federal governments are getting a new government badge to help users better identify official apps.

The badge will first appear on over 3,000 apps for 12 different countries.

  • XenGiEnglish
    47•7 months ago

    Depends, some of the government apps are actually pretty well done and you don’t want to end up with an unofficial ID card app that steals your identity. The German Ausweis App is a good example of a well done gov app.

    • voxelEnglish
      5•7 months ago

      btw, Ukraine’s Diia (дія) app is pretty good too and mostly open source (both backend and frontend components are fully open source, but document microservices which directly contact govt registeies in order to fetch the data are kept proprietary; they would be useless without proper authorization anyway though)

      it also provides seamless authorization using managed keypairs (i.e. instead of using your own hardware keys to sign electronic documents, you can just use the app, which also provides a convinient oauth-like flow. Signing up for a bank account literally turns into a single tap, a face scan, and providing e.g. salary info etc)

      • @[email protected]English
        5•7 months ago

        I think its actually open souce, but they recently had a really bad security problem in their application and never really admitted that it was critical. So yeah im good for now, i really hate the move to storing the exact same data that was on a chip before, in an app that can have software problems and analytics.

        • @[email protected]
          -3•7 months ago

          That’s my thought as well. Our phones really do not need to become absolutely everything because then it becomes really easy to track and really terrible to lose which you are bound to do eventually.

      • TurunEnglish
        1•7 months ago

        It provides the capability to authenticate yourself online, e.g. for banking services. It would also be able to prove to a website that you are over 18, without telling the website your birthday. I have yet to use it, but from a technical standpoint it’s pretty awesome.

        Edit: to clear up some confusion that may exist: as far as I know the app provides the bridge between the chip in the ID card and the application that needs the authentication. No data needs to be stored in the app.