Amber Neely
Germany plans to utilize iOS 13's NFC stack, allowing users with an iPhone to serve as a user's passport or ID card — but what iPhones can be used for this isn't quite clear yet.
Germany may soon be added to a short list of countries looking to allow users to use their iPhones in place of physical identification cards and passports, according to a post on the German government's Federal Ministry of the Interior website. The federal government's AusweisApp2 will be made available for free in the fall of 2019, allowing German citizens and visitors to use their iPhone as a digital ID card, an electronic visa, and a digital copy of their passport.
Apple has worked in tandem with the UK on a similar agreement that would allow users to verify their identity in the Brexit app.
The Japanese government has also confirmed plans to allow the iPhone to serve as a resident's "My Number Card." Japan hopes that this will streamline several social programs, such as tax collection, social services, and disaster countermeasures.
Apple has planned on allowing users the ability to replace physical copies of their ID with their iPhone for some time now, based on a patent application from March of 2018.
It's not currently clear if iPhones older than the current crop will be able to do this. Hardware related to the Core NFC expansion exists only within the iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max.
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7 Comments
Yes Please!
This is by far going to be the toughest nut to crack. The issue is not the tech, but the regulations behind the use of ID. You show up at a checkpoint somewhere in the world, and flash your iPhone at an official guarding a boarder who asks ask "papieren bitte." if you don't provide something subjectively acceptable to that individual, you're out of luck. So you'll need to carry both.
Just like I do with airline boarding passes.
While as a German citizen and avid Apple user, I would very much enjoy such great news, I think AI is misreading the release.
AusweisApp is not meant to replace the German national ID card with an electronic token, but rather to enable the highly-secure physical ID card that uses advanced hardware security (Neuer Personalausweis/nPA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_identity_card) to be used to authenticate and offer ID-card included information like name, address, age verification, etc., to online services (e.g. eGovernment services, taxes, etc., but also *authorized* commercial companies).
This was so-far possible with certain certified NFC readers that connect to the ID card, together with AusweisApp on PC, Mac and Linux, as well as Android phones. On iOS it was not possible because Apple would not provide API access to NFC functionality.
Nevertheless, the default use case would be to connect using iOS device to such a secure web service, then the service makes AusweisApp start from the Browser, then AusweisApp builds a secure tunnel, the user would hold the government-issued ID card close to his phone, and then the web service would communicate directly with the card. The protocols, encryption, authentication, privacy and other mechanisms are designed to make it impossible to "clone" the card, so allowing this through a simple app would be the proof that the card's design is flawed. I don't think this is on the table right now.
The article should be verified, and possibly updated.
Looking forward to this, as a German citizen living abroad this might be really useful. :)
...Germans in general are perplexing: they mostly buy cheap androids while at the same time thinking they care about privacy. I don’t expect high acceptance because of this mixture of niggardliness and scepticism towards new solutions. Even if this would increase security and privacy. :p