Instead of replacing passports with apps, in between would support passport cards. Better to allow using national ID cards as passports. The digital data could be saved on card but with physical photo and info as backup. It also works for people without smartphone.
The US has passport cards but they only work for land and sea from Canada, Mexico, and Caribbean countries.
Recent Canadian passports are basically a plastic card glued to the first page of a paper passport. For backwards compatibility it seems - it’s obvious the plastic card contains the chip and everything that matters.
Chips have been present in passports, even the all-paper ones, since the 1990s, with all the same information. They’re called “Biometric Passports”. The plastic card in newer passports is for durability and making them more difficult to forge.
But the chip doesn’t contain “everything that matters”. The chips have biometric info (hence the name) like legal name, sex, nationality, photos, and sometimes fingerprints. But the bulk of a passport book is made up of tens of pages where stamps, stickers, and even entire visa documents can be stapled/attached. None of these are present in the chip.
The chip has at least the same information that is printed in machine readable format on the photo page.
It has all the same fields in one or two lines with "<" field separators.
I've had the chip read, I've also seen the passport being scanned to read those lines.
A passport has two components, one is identification of the holder, the other is the travel (entry/exit stamps) history and potentially the conditions of entry (visas etc).
> The chips have biometric info (hence the name) like legal name, sex, nationality, photos, and sometimes fingerprints
... legal names and nationalities aren't "biometric info" though. Is it fair to say that the chip contains the content of the travel document at the time it was issued (doesn't the chip also include the passport number, issue/expiration dates, etc) but not the stamps/visas that are added after the passport is issued ? I think everyone gets that the chip isn't updated when you get stamped into or out of a country.
> Is it fair to say that the chip contains the content of the travel document at the time it was issued
Yes to expiration date and number (although afaik it does vary because each country may include or exclude certain information), but in general no, because even if you have a visa issued to you at the time of a passport being issued (like at the time of a passport renewal), the chip will not have that information. The chip information is basically just proving who you are, but doesn’t have any info on where you are permitted to go (other than permissions implied by your characteristics like nationality). That information is stored elsewhere, like in the passport pages or a country’s internal immigration records.
National ID cards are widely used for international travel in Europe. You just need to standardize them, so that every checkpoint doesn't have to support 200 weird national standards.
I think the digital portion is pretty standard nowadays (same as biometric passports, plus any national addons like e-signing on top of that). And physical features are customizable, but that’s atrue for passports as well.
you're talking about humans, a civilization that cannot fully win the decades-long fight for one portable charging format, and proposing all governments get on the same page about their passports?
The machine readable printed parts are covered by an international standard
ISO/IEC 7501-1 [1].
So despite your cynicism, all governments literally are on the same page about passports.
What do people think organizations like ISO, ITU, ICAO etc do other than exactly this sort of standardization process of human activities that are common across national boundaries?
National ID cards are evil. They are not a thing in my country and there would be very very strong opposition if they were seriously proposed (including riots, like when vaccine mandates were imposed on a subset of the population a few years ago). The passport is the only thing remotely close to a national ID, and a good proportion of the population do not have one. Standardizing a national tracking ID so foreign powers can know everything about you and sell it to further enrich their oligarchs? Not a chance.
i don't even know if it would work for majority of Mexico tbh. Around covid time, especially in non-Cancun airports, they would basically refuse to let me leave the country if the stupid physical entry stamp was not perfectly readable. Explain to them the digital revolution.
The US has passport cards but they only work for land and sea from Canada, Mexico, and Caribbean countries.