Google announces digital ID wallet
Google Wallet can now function as a digital ID, the tech giant announced Thursday.
Users can upload their passports to Google Wallet by scanning the passport chip and verifying their biometric identity with a short selfie video. Once verified, a digital version of the passport will be stored on the app. Currently, the digital ID can only be used at select TSA checkpoints, but Google envisions a future when it will be used everywhere.
“Imagine starting a vacation like this,” Google Wallet executive Alan Stapelberg wrote in a blog post last week. “You arrive at the airport and breeze through security by tapping your phone to a reader, scanning your boarding pass and ID. While waiting to board, you grab a drink at an airport bar, tapping your phone to prove your age. When you arrive at your destination, you find your rental car and leave the lot without stopping for an in-person ID check because you already provided the necessary information in the rental car app. You check into your hotel online and your key is issued straight to your digital wallet. You do all of this with your phone — no physical wallet required.”
Google is also expanding the wallet to include multiple forms of ID, not just passports. California residents can already upload their state-issued driver’s licenses to the app, which will soon accommodate residents in Iowa, Ohio, and New Mexico.
“Digital ID adoption will truly scale when daily use cases like driving a car, picking up prescriptions and more can be done with a digital ID,” Stapelberg continued. “There’s also a future where digital IDs can be used for things like online tax filing, signing a home loan, opening a bank account or signing up for medical benefits — all from your phone. And the industry is working to make these things happen.”
The tech giant assures users it is “working with governments, regulators and beyond” on the digital ID feature.
This, however, might be exactly what some users fear: a government-funded tech monolith with totalitarian tendencies working closely with authoritarian governments. Such alliances could usher in the United Nations’ vision of a digital ID dystopia.
Digital ID: A tracking system
In an article titled “Why legal identity is crucial to tackling the climate crisis,” UNDP officials made the case for why digital identity is a key weapon against climate change. If governments assign digital identities to citizens, they explained, authorities can track populations more easily in an environmental disaster.
The UNDP further argued that countries that roll out digital identity programs will have more data about their taxpayers that can then be used in an emergency. Governments should know the income and health status of every taxpayer, as well as their education level, according to the UN. This would help authorities have a more “targeted response” to citizens during, for example, a weather disaster, claims the world body.
Digital ID: A way to ‘change behaviors’
But digital identity is not only for tracking taxpayer movements and backgrounds. It can also be used to track how much energy taxpayers are consuming, says the UNDP. Once a government has this data, it can force citizens to change their energy consumption habits, or what the UNDP calls “inspiring behavior change.”
“Leveraging digital legal ID data to track energy consumption, inspire behaviour change, and enhance sustainability measures can mitigate climate-related disasters,” the UNDP officials wrote.
This push for digital ID, however, is not a new one. The UN has had a years-long objective to ensure that every person is assigned a digital ID. One of the organization’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to register all children under five with digital legal identities.
Digital ID: The center of a taxpayer's life
According to the UN’s vision, each individual’s digital identity will be tied to other aspects of his or her life, creating a kind of digital web. At the center of this web would be the ID, which would be accessible to government authorities.
The Gold Report revealed last year, for example, that GAVI, a UN-sponsored vaccination body, began pilot testing a program in Ghana that immediately registers the biometric data of every newborn. At birth, infants’ fingerprints are scanned, as are the voices of their parents or caregivers. These data are used to create digital identities that track each baby’s vaccinations and allow him or her to receive government benefits.
In May 2023, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for universal welfare, which he said governments should distribute to citizens according to their digital IDs. Those IDs, he explained, should be linked to private bank accounts:
Digital IDs linked with bank or mobile money accounts can improve the delivery of social protection coverage and serve to better reach eligible beneficiaries. Digital technologies may help to reduce leakage, errors and costs in the design of social protection programmes.
Digital ID: Surveillance State
But the concept raises concern among opponents of digital ID, which is considered by some to be the successor to vaccine passports. Critics say that digital ID increases the probability of government surveillance and totalitarian overreach. For example, while a government can use a taxpayer’s digital ID to deposit money, it could also use it to lock their bank account if they haven’t paid their carbon taxes, another proposed reform by Guterres.
