I did all of these things (printed, screenshot, pulled up a webpage) and also had a successful scan of a picture of a QR code that I had in my photoreel (which showed the entire printout, of course, with my name, etc. on it).
There has been a lot of progress both in fundamentals and implementations on this front over recent years but even decades old schemes using attestations would have been a huge improvement over “dump and read data through trusted server”.
Here’s a trivial one that anyone could implement without using anything new from the past decade: Whoever stands as “trusted party” could have signing certificates distributed to the verifier-side of the app. They sign hashes of the relevant info. All data sharing needed is once per issuance of “vaccination certificate”. No persistence of PII necessary. If you don’t want to have to disclose PII as part of validation, that’s where the fancier schemes come in.
If you can’t or won’t spend resources to do it properly then yes, physical card is preferred.
It’s not that terrible compared to what’s out there and falls in the “trivial” category (which is not necessarily a negative; less complexity is good) but it’s far from ideal and it’d have to improve before pushing it globally.
Yes. A passport is orders of magnitude harder to forge than for some app written by a random government contractor to leak data.
Because it's just a QR code, you can store it however you'd like. If you want, you can print it out and carry it around in your pocket. It's easy to check: you just need to read the information and check that it's digitally signed by a trusted authority (both of these can be done by an app), and check the the person listed in the QR code is the person in front of you (e.g., by asking for an ID).
How about that.
The amount of tyranny people are willing to accept as a response to this is still baffling to me, it is like this is the first time humanity has ever encountered a communicable illness...
This is not the proper way to respond to said illness and does not bode well for the future of individual liberty
