If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Samsung wants your passport living inside your phone and it has handed the keys to a private company called CLEAR. The announcement landed on May 26. Samsung Electronics America and CLEAR are launching Samsung ID with CLEAR, a digital passport that sits in Samsung Wallet and lets US travelers verify their identity at more than 250 TSA checkpoints by tapping their phone or scanning a QR code. Samsung and CLEAR are providing a “safe, secure, and free mobile digital ID designed to simplify users’ busy lives,” the company says. The selling point is convenience. What you actually exchange for it is your face, your passport data and a permanent place in a corporate identity network most people have never read the terms of. Setting it up reveals the shape of the bargain. You scan a valid US passport, then complete a face verification step run by CLEAR before the credential appears in your wallet. That scan is an enrollment into the same biometric network CLEAR has spent years wiring into airports and arenas, a network the company now puts at 41 million members and is pushing straight into the device you carry everywhere. “CLEAR’s secure identity verification platform makes experiences safer and easier – both physically and digitally,” said CLEAR CEO Caryn Seidman Becker. “Now with CLEAR’s secure identity platform embedded in Samsung Wallet, verifying your identity is easier than ever. Samsung ID with CLEAR gives you a simple, secure ID in the palm of your hand.” Notice what gets sold as progress. A federal identity document, and the biometric scan that locks it to your body, now route through a publicly traded private firm that earns its revenue by becoming the gatekeeper between you and the places you want to enter. Samsung points to Knox security, on-device encryption, and a required fingerprint or PIN, and those protections are real on the phone itself. They say nothing about what CLEAR retains on its own systems once your face and passport have passed through verification. The company anticipates that question. CLEAR states it is committed to privacy and that it does not sell biometric or sensitive personal data. Promising not to sell the data is not the same as not holding it and a pledge made today binds no future owner, regulator, or law enforcement request tomorrow. Then there is the reach beyond the airport. The credential already works for age checks at BMO Stadium in Los Angeles, with more venues planned. “BMO Stadium is proud to be among the select venues leading the adoption of mobile digital identity verification,” said Christian Lau, Chief Technology Officer at BMO Stadium. Each new venue trains people to treat a phone-based identity scan as the ordinary cost of walking through a door. Samsung is not breaking ground here so much as falling in line. Apple and Google wired passport storage into their own wallets first, and the coverage greeting this launch treated it as Samsung finally catching up rather than doing anything new. When the three companies that control nearly every phone in circulation all offer the same thing, a face scan tied to a federal document stops reading as a remarkable demand and starts reading as a default you would look paranoid for refusing. Each rollout arrives dressed as a small kindness, a card you no longer have to dig for, and each one nudges up the baseline of what you are expected to surrender to get through an ordinary day. The wallet that began by holding your credit cards now holds your driver’s license, your passport, your house keys, and your face, and the firms assembling it would prefer you call that tidiness rather than the construction of a single private chokepoint your identity has to pass through. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Samsung Throws Its Support Behind Digital ID appeared first on Reclaim The Net.