> It's bad enough to have the government requiring you to have a government-approved smart phone

The government isn't requiring that.

It's not forcing you to get a mobile ID.

Your physical ID continues to be just fine. Mobile device ID's are simply for people who want the convenience of not carrying the physical one.

Edit: geez, what's with the downvotes? I wasn't even defending anything. Just trying to keep things factually accurate here.

Think long-term. In 40 years, when the last paper IDs are discontinued, we'll all be tracked, but the time to complain was now.

> are simply for people who want the convenience

That's the technological ratchet at work, as it has been since the dawn of humanity. A solution that's convenient or useful enough to gain wide adoption has a way of becoming a soft necessity, and eventually a hard one. Some examples that meaningfully affected our lives[0], in many ways not for the better:

- An accurate clock / watch -- hard necessity. Good luck functioning in society without it. Opening hours, appointments, public transit schedules, are just few among many things synchronized in time, that expect you to have a clock so you can stay in sync too. And no, you can't get away with a rooster or a sundial, like you could 200 years ago - you need precision of at least a minute.

- A car -- somewhere between hard and soft necessity, depending on where you live. The society expects you to be able to commute long distances in short time, for things like work, medical services, or government appointments.

- Mobile phones, Internet, credit/debit cards -- soft necessities. You can sort of still live without them even in the big cities, but it's going to be a pain, as everything is optimized on the assumptions everyone owns a smartphone, has Internet access, bank account with a card, and increasingly often, means of contactless payments (think e.g. public transit). There's a reason even the poorest people without a roof over their heads still own iPhones, and it's not entertainment.

- Government ID app, electronic IDs, other means to do official errands fully on-line - convenience for now. I feel they'll transition into soft necessities within next 10 years, simply because interacting with government is always very annoying, and those tools simplify that process and save you some trips.

--

[0] - All in context of the developed/industrialized/western societies; of course this does not apply to societies that did not embrace a particular technology (yet).

Until they aren't.