Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sandos 1288 days ago
Its fascinating what EU can accomplish, but in my mind drivers licenses and "national IDs" (that are usable when travelling in EU) should be merged and unified over the union. Imagine how much simpler things would be! And this tech used in Germany sounds like a very nice base for it.

I mean I would also make them passports but I think that is impossible.
3 comments
bobbruno 1287 days ago
This may be difficult for an American to understand, but a driver's license is not a core document, and many people may not have it. In most places it'd not come to mind in a discussion about digital ID.
link
joeschmopoe 1288 days ago
Lots of people don't have a license but do move around and across EU borders a lot.

The IDs are actually heavily unified nowadays https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_t...

link
bee_rider 1288 days ago
I would imagine that different countries might had slightly different traffic laws or acceptable risk levels, so might want to have their own licensing schemes. Maybe the could have a unified form-factor that gets stamped by the individual countries though.
link
joeschmopoe 1288 days ago
They do, all IDs are in ID-1 form factor, stamped by the countries and the EU [1].

It's the same for driver's licenses [2], they are accepted in all EU member states and basically look exactly the same, just in different languages and show a different flag.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_t...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_driving_licence

link