Comment by lxgr
8 hours ago
The Austrian ID card does that. It’s a really blurry black-and-white photo only, but it’s still recognizable and I find it quite impressive that any type of photo (in addition to its public key signature) can fit into a QR code at all.
This is a radical idea, but we should remove photos from ids entirely.
Having the photo there just encourages sloppy ID checks by human eye, and it's much easier to mislead the human eye than it is to forge an NFC chip.
If the photo was in the chip only, we'd force ID verifiers to do their job properly, and make forgeries structurally impossible. With basically everybody having an NFC-enabled phone now, you wouldn't even need people to get extra hardware for this.
I have to say that I really don't love the idea of having my ID scanned (and definitely not stored, wink wink) every time I buy a drink etc. Having both paths available, depending on the "severity" and expected anonymity of the situation, seems nice to have.