I'm really wary of these initiatives, because perfect law enforcement is how society ossifies. Imagine if we could prosecute all homosexual tendencies when they happened, or all interracial relationships, or any other antiquated law. Society would never progress. What happens if the government can now perfectly enforce that people under 18 can't do X or Y?
How does this apply to a digital version of an official government ID? The government already has all this data.
You normally aren't carrying your passport with you, right? So even if lower security, the chance of that information being swiped is generally lower.
Phones are pretty high profile targets, this makes them more so.
I do like the idea and the convenience, but I'm definitely wary of these things too. Especially in the modern tech world where security is often being treated as a second thought as it is less impactful for sales. I'm pretty sure it is always cheaper to implement the security, but right now we're not great at playing long games and we like to gamble. Humans have always been pretty bad at opportunity costs. We see the dollars spent now and that seems to have far more value than what you save later.
On the other hand, currently US citizens are not legally required to walk around with their IDs on them. That's not true for non-citizens btw. You should have to just give the officer your name, but they can detain you while they "verify your identity." With an ID becoming frictionless and more commonly held on person, will this law change? Can we trust that it'll stay the same given our current environment of more frequent ID requests (I'm trying to stay a bit apolitical. Let's not completely open up that issue here?). I'd say at best it is "of concern." But we do live in a world run by surveillance capitalism.
There's a really good example I like of opportunity cost that shows the perverse nature of how we treat them. Look at the Y2K bug. Here on HN most of us know this was a real thing that would have cost tons of money had we not fixed it. But we did. The success was bittersweet though, as the lack of repercussions (the whole point of fixing the problem!) resulted in people believing the issue was overblown. Most people laugh at Y2K as if it was a failed doomsday prediction rather than a success story of how we avoided a "doomsday" (to be overly dramatic) situation. So we create a situation where you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you do fix a problem, people treat you as if you were exaggerating the problem. If you don't fix the problem you get lambasted for not having foreseen the issue, but you do tend to be forgiven for fixing it.
Just remember, CloudStrike's stock is doing great[0] ($546). Had you bought the dip ($218) you'd have made a 150% ROI. They didn't even drop to where they were a year previously, so had you bought in July of 2023 ($144) and sold in the dip you'd have still made a 50% profit in that year... (and 280% if you sold today).
Convince me we're good at playing the long game... Convince me we're not acting incredibly myopic... Convince me CloudStrike learned their lesson and the same issue won't happen again...