You should never voluntarily hand over your phone to a police officer.
It will become increasingly tempting for police to ask and for you to comply, especially as more and more states adopt digital ID systems that allow drivers licenses and state IDs to be added to Apple Wallet on iOS and Google Wallet on Android. Californians can now add their driver's licenses and state IDs to their iPhones and Apple Watches on In addition to Android devicesmaking the state one of seven (along with Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Hawaii and Ohio) that allow digital IDs to be stored through Apple's system.
These particular digital IDs are so far fairly limited. California's are for use at “select TSA checkpoints” and participating businesses, for example; they're not intended for use as identification at traffic stops or other interactions with law enforcement, meaning users are still supposed to carry their physical IDs. But other states, including tech-spotlight/la-wallet/”>Louisiana and Colorado — have rolled out their own digital IDs that can be used during traffic stops and other interactions with police, which may have fewer privacy protections. And Apple's vision for Apple Pay has long been explicit. To replace your entire walletwhich means that eventually these IDs willpower be intended for use during police stops.
Either way, teaching people to add their IDs to their phones means that some people will inevitably leave the house without a physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for police to demand phones — something they should never, ever do. Leaving aside the technical details of your digital ID, handing your phone over to a police officer gives the police a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.
In Riley v. California, he Supreme Court It was held unanimously Police need a warrant to search cellphones, even during otherwise lawful arrests. But if you hand your unlocked phone to a police officer and offer to show him something, “it becomes a complicated factual question about what consent you have given for a search and what the limits of that are,” said Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Democracy Center. The edge. “There have been cases where people have given consent to do one thing, then the police have taken the entire phone, copied the entire phone, found other evidence on the phone, and the legal question that arose in court was: did that violate the scope of consent?”
If the police do If you have a court order to search your phone, numerous courts have said they can require you to provide biometric access via your face or finger. (It's still an unresolved legal question since then.) Other courts have ruled The Fifth Amendment generally protects handing over passwords as a form of self-incrimination, but logging in with biometric data is often not considered protected “testimonial” evidence. In the words of tech-policy/2024/04/cops-can-force-suspect-to-unlock-phone-with-thumbprint-us-court-rules/”>A decision by a federal appeals courtIt requires “no cognitive effort, which puts it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at the time of registration.”
The court said its ruling should not necessarily extend to “every case in which a biometric system is used to unlock an electronic device” because Fifth Amendment issues “are highly fact-dependent and the line between what is testimonial and what is not is particularly fine.” Recode He pointed out in 2020A defense attorney could argue that any evidence found this way is illegal and should be suppressed, but that’s a risky bet. “It’s fair to say that invoking one’s right not to turn over evidence is stronger than trying to have evidence suppressed after the fact,” said Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Recode for that piece.
At this point, you might be thinking: you don't have anything incriminating on your phone! And an officer could come to that conclusion. But they could also find something you didn't even know was there. “There are a lot of laws in place, and if a prosecutor or police officer decides to go after you, are you sure “You didn’t do anything?” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & technology Project. The edge“You’re just opening yourself up to abuse, to mistakes, to errors. There could be a coincidence that put you at the scene of a crime you weren’t even aware of.” Even if you assume that most officers act in good faith, there are plenty of documented cases of officers abusing their power and facing no legal repercussions. There’s no reason to preemptively hand over something that could be used against you.
Current systems from Apple and Google have some minor protections: you can show an encrypted ID without fully unlocking your phone, and various authorities can scan your ID wirelessly if they have special readers. But you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re searching the internet for the technical and policy details of your digital ID system when a cop asks for your phone: you’re much better off handing over your license.
