I doubt everyone will still be carrying phones as we know them in a decade, so we might indeed be headed for a future where governments keep giant databases of biometric information. Works OK if you trust your government to handle that properly and not abuse it in the future. The real headache is crossing borders, where your details end up in the hands of a foreign state.

For one thing, it increases resilience in the event of outages. It is a tangible aspect - just like citizens are encouraged to keep cash at home at least in my country (Sweden)

I don’t see why they would bother with physical tokens nor would they be popular - things like passports are really quite expensive to manage and largely unecessary these days.

OK. I'll bite. Why are they unnecessary?

Passports have two things. They have information on them, which can be read by looking at them. And they have information on them in chip form, which can be scanned, and is also cryptographically signed by the issuing authority (eg, a government).

To verify a passport you can look at it visually, but you can also scan and validate the info, including photo, in digital form. All you need is the CSCA, the 'country signing certificate' to do so, and there aren't may of those. Small readers exist which are updated with these certs, and so even in the middle of a war zone, with RF jamming, you can verify a country signed what you're looking at.

Relying upon the Internet being there for ID purposes is a massive fail. You'd don't need a networked reachable database to validate that your ID is valid, in a digital way, which can be really helpful with 1M refugees show up at your door during a war, or when the capital city of the issuing nation has been bombed.

You may think this unimportant, but the edge cases are what 99.999% uptime is all about. And the edge cases with ID really need 100% uptime. The last thing you need during a natural disaster is an inability to ... well, do anything.

So even if you have biometric methods to identify someone, you'll also want a local, on person method which has those on chip, and signed by a government saying who you are.

Having ID network connected is also a massive, huge, immense fail. There should be no network connected databases of anything about anyone, in any form. Why? It'll be hacked. This will never, ever, ever change. Never. Paper records can't be hacked en masse, and you can get the same protections by storing records on individual chips with other associated info in paper form.

Dismantling this infrastructure and replacing it with buggy, hackable, online databases just to get digital ID verification is a complete move in the wrong direction. Verifying digitally signed information is not.

And passports can be scanned by phones.

Which means that the info, cryptographically signed, can be verified by anyone in the world too.

Really, what we need is to have everyone chipped, like a pet. Because that's where this ends up, and that's also the only way to always have your ID with you.

As a snarky aside, I've spent my entire life interacting with society all the time, yet only in the last decade has it been necessary to be "carded" constantly to do so. We've literally taken a privacy conscious society, and turned it into a nightmare. I'm identified when I go buy a loaf of bread, the most dystopian, totalitarian government anyone could ever conceive of, is a joke compared to the amount of control and tracking now exercised over people's lives.

So I guess my point is...

If it's annoying and difficult to have to carry around a physical identifier of who you are? And use it regularly?

Why is the solution to make it easier to submit to slavery?

Think that's an over the top statement?

We all know how the US government has pivoted on many things during the current administration. We also know it has had, and continues to have (via private enterprise) a robust degree of information about every fiscal transaction made.

If you look at the McCarthy hearings, they literally went so far as to find documents from decades prior, paper records of course, of people joining socialist clubs in university. Eg, simply sign-in sheets, or their names listed in the minutes of such orgs.

Decades later, that information was used to blacklist careers, destroy lives, not for any proof of malfeasance by those accused, but simply because they were curious in college about socialism.

Those same accused were then used to "name names".

My point is, from the financial data currently being stored about people, anything that makes you stand out in any way could be turned into a problem 10 years down the road. Not to mention, how credit card usage, and digital tracking, and location tracking might hit some pattern.

No one who lived through the McCarthy hearings, just watching them, or lived through how Germany or Russia controlled the lives of their citizens, would ever think any of this increased fingerprint of people is a good idea.

It's all just very dumb. And it will not end well at all.

This is not the same. For instance, we can access the internet without needing that ID. But right now there are attempts to force a digital ID in order to access information on the www - this is the whole idea behind "age verification". The kids are just used as excuse here. It has never been about the kids.