In the UK, you can renew your passport online too.
I don't really see the risks: they check that your picture matches the old one and you still have to send your old passport for them to issue you the new one..
Yeah, it's very convenient. If you've already sent them a photo for a driving license (for example) the system can just use that photo on your passport, or if your passport expires before your license, vice versa.
The part that I find extraordinary is the authentication process for the first UK passport (like after acquiring a citizenship). They don't have an old photo to compare to, they won't look at a foreign ID either. So the authentication process consists in asking me a series of personal questions (that I know they don't know the answer to because I never gave it to them at any point in the process) and look at me in the eye to assess whether I am truthful.
Welcome to the world where your government does not actually have a proper, audited, secure and centralized database of all its citizens. Even third-world countries have it better.
I think the risk is now all the data in your passport app is online?
The old one for Canada was a fillable pdf, which seems more secure?
But then again, I assume they just optically scan it and it sits in a database anyways? Maybe it doesn’t matter. I just talked myself out of any concern.
You still have to send your old passport in. Somebody who has stolen your passport can renew it. That's a fairly minimal consequence for all the trouble.
In the UK, you upload a photo from your phone of yourself (that it checks to make sure is valid), you put in your old passport number, and you send your old passport by post to the office. Then in a few days you get your new passport with the photo from your phone.
Valid here means, the app tries to determine if you did any of the things the rules tell you not to do, like, wearing sunglasses, or using the photo of you with your best friend, or taking a full body photo when they want a face. Later a human will check, and also compare the photo to your last one. Maybe you dyed your hair blond... and grew a different moustache... But how did your missing eye grow back? And why is your nose now further up your face?
So the app catches a lot of dumb mistakes that you could make, before a human had to waste their time, but it isn't the only validation.
The UK doesn't have a requirement for anyone to carry ID. I've never carried ID.
Most young people will carry photo ID because it's needed to get into a night club, to buy booze and so on. There are policies like "Check 25" enforced in some places which tell staff they ought to refuse to serve people who seem under-25 unless they can prove they're legal to drink (18 in the UK) but (a) I don't drink and (b) I haven't looked young enough for many years now. For this purpose they can use a driving license if they have one, and there are several other acceptable forms of photo ID including some non-government ID.
If you're driving a motor vehicle police can require you to provide proof that you (and thus you'll need ID) are entitled to be driving this vehicle but it's not instant, so if it happened to me I'd put a note in my diary to take my driving license to the police when it's convenient.
Historically German occupied countries in the war had mandatory ID and so there's an association in British minds (largely false) between winning WWII and not needing to carry ID. Government has tried various strategies to try to change this but they haven't been successful.
Certain non-citizens have to physically attend somewhere at intervals so that government can keep track of them, a Russian colleague of mine would sometimes be late because she'd spend the morning waiting for her local police to confirm that yup, she was still here, still had a visa authorising her to work here, hadn't gone anywhere else. But since citizens do not carry ID the non-citizens don't need ID the rest of the time anyway although I expect many do carry some out of habit.
Many older British people won't own any photo ID. If you can't or don't drive, and never travel abroad you'd have no practical use for it. I suspect my grandmother (who hadn't driven since WWII) didn't have any ID more recent than a war-era government ID with no photograph.
