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Don’t Add Your ID to a Digital Wallet

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The iPhone 13 mini on a journal. It's still smaller than an A5 journal and so hand-friendly.

Your phone has more info than your journal. Why share it?

Dozens of women have had risqué photos stolen from their phones after handing them over to police. And those are just the ones that caught the police doing so. Police, especially in the United States, live in a society that gives them nearly unchecked power and authority. That leads to them doing some unconscionable things because they think they have the right to do so. When you hand your phone to officers, they may unlock it with your face or fingerprint if you weren’t quick enough to turn those off. From there, they can look through your entire device. Maybe for evidence, maybe for something else.

So why would you put your ID on your phone and hand it over to them?

It could be texts you sent a friend. Jokes about politics, complaints about America’s gestapo, ICE, or personal photos, police will have access to all of that if you give it to them.

Apple’s rolling out the ability to add your passport to your digital wallet, which they say is secure, but they’re not looking at the whole picture. In a vacuum, it could be secure. In America’s justice system, perhaps not. Here’s why you should absolutely not put your passport or state ID on your phone, and how you can protect your phone, privacy, and safety if it is handed over to the police.

Don’t Give them A Reason

“It becomes this complicated factual question about what consent you’ve granted for a search and what the limits of that are.”

– Brett Max Kaufman, Senior Staff Attorney at ACLU’s Center for Democracy, to The Verge

When you give your phone, unlocked, to police, suddenly you may have inadvertently consented to a search of your entire digital space. It’s the equivalent of inviting police into your home. Once you do that, they can look around. Then you have a fight on your hand where you have to prove you did not consent to a search, which can be hard to prove. If you hand over your unlocked phone to a cop, they may do whatever they want with it, even if the law is against them, and proving your intention later will be incredibly difficult.

You may say, “Well I haven’t committed any crimes! What do I have to fear?” First of all, are you sure you haven’t? No evidence of jaywalkking or speeding? Could your GPS accidentally put you in the same place a crime was committed—by someone else—and accidentally falsely incriminate yourself? Do you have photos on your phone you may not want police to see? Or potentially steal, if you’re someone they find attractive? Have you made a joke with friends that could be misconstrued as a threat? Who knows. Your entire phone could be copied to be examined later. There’s no reason to hand over your entire digital life to police, you never know what they could come up with.

Apple will point out that the scannable IDs don’t violate your privacy and don’t require you unlock your device. But a police officer insisting you unlock your phone under the threat of violence or arrest might be able to convince you to do so. Thanks to the fact that these IDs can be on devices, they may use it as an excuse to get your unlocked phone regardless. Qualified immunity means police officers may violate your constitutional rights if they think it was reasonable at the time. Do you trust all police? If you think there could be some bad apples, why take the risk? If you think they’re all bad apples, you know the rest of the saying.

On top of that, providing a secondary device for your identification could lead to further issues. Where do you keep your phone? In a bag? In a different pocket? Pulling it out could lead to further searching of your bag. It could lead a police officer to claim you’re reaching for a weapon. Every time you have to hand an item over to police you could be putting yourself at risk. If they demand both your digital and physical IDs to ensure they match, you double the chance of an issue.

Then there’s the more widely known issue with passports in America right now. People who’s gender presentation does not match the sex they were assigned at birth, either because they’re transgender or intersex, need to be able to self-ID to make sure their ID matches their current appearance. However, the Trump administration is coming after people who, through no fault of their own, may not have a presentation that matches their birth certificate. A digital ID could be updated on the servers with the misinformation Trump’s pushing on these people. That could out trans or intersex people, or make security professionals assume that an ID could be fake because the gender the government says a person has does not match what they actually look like. It steals people’s agency, it reduces security readiness by complicating the process of verifying a person’s identity, and it puts vulnerable groups at a heightened risk for discrimination, imprisonment, or injury. However, physical copies that have not been tarnished by Trump’s weird fixation with trans and intersex people are safer than those that could be updated without consent or notification by an ID issuer.

Lock Your Phone for Real

Just skip the digital ID. And if police are asking you to hand over your ID, here’s how you can protect yourself.

Most courts have agreed that forcing people to give up their phone passcode is a violation of their 5th amendment rights against self incrimination. However, bio-authentication, your face or your fingerprint, rarely has the same protection. That means police can force you to unlock your phone with these. However, you can always turn off these features quickly. On the iPhone, just press the lock button 5 times quickly or press and hold down the lock button and volume up buttons. On Android, you can press and hold the lock button until you get a dialog, then choose “Lockdown.” These will turn off bio-authentication and protect your privacy.

If you’re going to a protest, you’ll want to take some additional precautions. This is because GPS can place you in the protest if your phone is taken later or if police want to go through your Google location history, cellular provider’s triangulation records, or other app’s location history to figure out where you were. This is called “geofencing,” and has gotten people in trouble for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For protests, you should either leave the phone at home or invest in a faraday bag. If you leave your phone at home, be sure to write down numbers of friends or family members you could call to set up legal representation, bail, or anything else you may need. If you go with the faraday bag, be sure to turn Face ID, Touch ID, or any other form of bio-authentication off. If a cop could steal your bag and take your phone out of it, you can’t force a hard lock on it before they’d have it. These will prevent location tracking on your device, as well as any other contact.

Get Your Shit Together, America

Re-think the police state you live in where cops have such unrestricted power to invade your privacy, put you in danger, and restrict your speech and other rights. Police are violent, have racial biases, face few consequences and have laws protecting their misbehavior, and use violence as a tool more often than they ever should. Rethink policing, America, while you still can, because something as simple as a digital ID shouldn’t be this dangerous.

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