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I rented a car, and within hours, my driver's license was for sale (arstechnica.com)
submitted 20 hours ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 22 points 17 hours ago* (7 children)

Why would they do that? What's the use of scanning it?

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  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago

    The stated justification is that it somehow catches forgeries that altered the front of an ID but didn’t make the barcode information match. That might have been justifiable in like 1980 or something, but it’s reaaaaaaally not hard to generate the correct barcode these days if you’re forging an ID.

    The real reason is to track and sell more data about you.

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  • [–] 9 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

    It's hooked up to a database to make sure it's not a fake ID.

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  • [–] 11 points 16 hours ago* (1 child)

    Is that really what’s going on? I always thought the barcode just contained the ID number and your information. Can probably be validated that the format is correct very easily, but you can use the correct format with incorrect data easily.

    I assumed the scan was still offline validation. Because if the database isn’t networkable from their store, I imagine they aren’t causing any issues in the sales process. So you would only need to precompile and print a valid barcode with correct-looking data.

    Probably won’t work for a police dispatch, who I’m sure are going to use online validation when they run the ID. But I’d swear that level of sophistication isn’t in gas stations yet.

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  • [–] 5 points 14 hours ago* (1 child)

    I don't know what kind of cards you have over there, but couldn't it just contain all required information including photo, digitally signed by the government?
    Wouldn't need the internet.

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  • [–] 3 points 13 hours ago

    Yeah, it could be digitally signed for offline verification. But I’m doubtful there’s enough standardization going on that corporations are integrating signature verification right there in the POS system. They’d need the public keys from the government, presumably. That doesn’t sound too difficult but also, setting up a process to get that info for all 50 states would probably be a mess. Do the states even sign the info to start — that’s another question.

    I think the infrastructure can be deployed. Though, I get the impression it would take more coordination than we actually see here in the wild.

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  • [–] 6 points 15 hours ago

    At best they are keeping an audit trail to be sure the clerk didn't sell alcohol to an underage person. But even if they aren't already I figure it will get retained and used in some manner. Marketing, insurance, who knows? Lots of data brokers would buy information on who buys alcohol.

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