Comment by SahAssar
1 day ago
So you have just built a wrapper around https://passportreader.app/, which itself is reading NFC enabled ID/passports from specific countries. The coverage map is here: https://passportreader.app/coverage.
Might be good to know that even in the US this approach would only work for ~50% of people, since a lot of people don't have passports. In most countries this does not work at all, since they don't issue NFC enabled ID/passports.
No humanity verification is perfect. 50% of people is already pretty good.
Really governments need to do better here, and make it possible to do this type of verification using zero knowledge proofs.
The "how it works" page for that website says that the ID data is "digitally signed by the issuing government". But there doesn't seem to be anything in the docs about how to get or verify that signature. So it seems like they are just asking users to trust them to do the verification.
> The coverage map is here: https://passportreader.app/coverage
Oh, cool! Russia is not on the list. Another service that excludes me just becasue I got lucky with the colour of my (NFC-enabled, biometric) passport.
On a less bitter note, I don’t think it’s that hard to build biometric passport validation. Face matching would be another thing, but for unregulated industries I don’t think you’ll need that, so why not grab some library from GitHub and be in control of the whole process? (You would still need to handle people without biometric passports somehow, of course.)