French patrons can face up to 6 months in prison for lacking Covid pass

French patrons can face up to 6 months in prison for lacking Covid pass(theguardian.com)

8 points by briefcomment 4 years ago | 5 comments

My perspective as a dual citizen French/American tech worker living in the US: the fact that there aren't digital Apple Wallet/smartphone covid passes is such a joke. Farcical levels of stupidity, something you'd read in an 'Idiot Hero' trope novel. It is such a failure to capitalize on the available technologies at our disposal as a global society.

Instead I have a piece of shit paper document from the CDC that isn't even a standard business/credit/debit card size (!) so it is already in tatters, with a grease stain (my dynamic life has failed me). Nowhere even asks for it, so enforcement is a failure in and of itself. The vaccine should be mandatory and there should be a sleek digital pass so I can not have one extra piece of paper to carry around because of inept structural decisions around how to implement a post-pandemic lifestyle. So stupid, I don't know how these social planners have jobs.

iammisc 4 years ago | |

Thank goodness we don't let authoritarians be social planners.

renerthr 4 years ago | |

Isn't this like the debate between paper voting and electronic voting? Wouldn't there be many security risks involved with smartphone passes?

ev1 4 years ago | | |

There are a significant number of ways to do it correctly. I personally would like one, but not centralised, but some form of completely anonymous time-limited digitally signed vaccination YES/NO/DAYS SINCE COMPLETED/TYPE and nothing else. Constantly morphing QR, only valid for a few minutes, prevent transferring via screenshot or passing a phone since it's invalidated after scan, whatever else.

I would be glad to show something like that to every store and restaurant - I explicitly do not want to give ANY store my phone number or any other information at all. I explicitly WISH TO tell the store that I am vaccinated with Moderna as of 2 weeks or more ago.

There are ways to do it reasonably correctly, but local bureaucratic bullshit will happen and what will appear is some kind of online-only spyware app that contains PII/PCI data encoded into your QR code.

vanusa 4 years ago |

More correctly: they can face a prison sentence (in extreme cases) or more likely a fine for entering a venue under false pretenses. Not simply for "lacking a pass".

Flagging for the clickbaity, and misleading title.