It's illegal to make copies of the ID card unless required by law. Opening a bank account is one of these things were the law requires a copy of the ID card due to money laundering legislation.
I find that law even more ridiculous given those requirements. Making it illegal to do X unless they force you to do X undermines almost all arguments for criminalizing X.
Not entirely. The companies that must collect presumably have better security safeguards than those just wanting it just because it's easy or customary.
I have a client that must collect and store drivers license copies for 2 years by state law. The system encrypts with GnuPG, such that only an offline private key stored on a crypto smart card can decrypt, and the encrypted image into a cloud storage bucket with an expiration date. Unless they get a spoliation order because the police come knocking no one ever sees the data. After 2 years, the file auto deletes and a record is left indicating that the record was "deleted in the ordinary course of business." The company does not really want to do all of this, but its required by law and good infosec practices.
I recently applied for it but they didn't ask me to send ID via email. They used idnow (http://www.idnow.eu/). You get a real operator via website (or even mobile) asking some questions and taking a photo of you and your passport. I was actually surprised as it worked quite seamlessly.
Yes, I went through the same, but wouldn't "taking a photo of your passport be the same as "scan your id card and send it over the internet" which OP claims is illegal?