You should never voluntarily give your phone to a police officer.
It's becoming increasingly tempting for police to ask, and for you to comply, especially as more states adopt digital ID systems that allow driver's licenses and state IDs to be added to Apple Wallet on iOS and Google Wallet on Android. Californians can now add their driver's licenses and state IDs not only to Android devices, but also to their iPhones and Apple Watches, making California one of seven states, along with Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Hawaii and Ohio, that allow digital ID storage through Apple's system.
These special digital IDs have been pretty limited so far. The ones in California, for example, are intended for use at “select TSA checkpoints” and participating businesses—they're not intended as ID during traffic stops or other police operations, meaning users still have to carry their physical IDs. But other states—including Louisiana and Colorado—have rolled out their own digital IDs that can be used during traffic stops and other police operations, where there may be less privacy protection. And Apple's vision for Apple Pay has long been explicitly to replace your entire wallet, meaning these IDs will eventually will intended for use during police checks.
Whatever the case, teaching people that they can store their IDs on their phones will inevitably make them leave home without physical ID. That, in turn, gives police the ability to ask for phones—which you should never do. Aside from the technical details of your digital ID, handing your phone over to a police officer gives law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal information.
In Riley v. California, The The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that police need a search warrant to search cellphones, even in otherwise lawful arrests. But if you hand a cop your unlocked phone and offer to show him something, “it becomes this complicated factual question of what consent you gave to a search and what the limits of that are,” said Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU's Center for Democracy. The edge. “There are cases where people have given their consent to do something and then the police have seized the entire phone, copied the entire message and found other evidence on the phone. In court, the legal question then becomes: Did this violate the scope of consent?”
If the police Do If you have a warrant for your phone, numerous courts have ruled that you can demand biometric login access using your face or finger. (This is still an unsettled legal question, as other courts have ruled that it is not possible.) The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution typically protects the disclosure of passwords as a form of self-incrimination, but logging in with biometrics is often not considered protected “evidence.” In the words of a federal appeals court ruling, it “requires no cognitive effort, putting it clearly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprinting at login.”
The court said its ruling did not necessarily extend to “all cases in which biometric data is used to unlock an electronic device” because Fifth Amendment questions “depend heavily on facts, and the line between what is testimony and what is not is particularly thin.” And how Recode As pointed out in 2020, a defense attorney could argue that any evidence found this way is illegal and should be suppressed – but that's a risky bet. “It's fair to say that invoking the right not to turn over evidence is stronger than trying to have the evidence suppressed after the fact,” said Andrew Crocker, a senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Recode for this piece.
At this point, you may be thinking: You don't have anything incriminating on your phone! And an officer could certainly come to that conclusion. But they could also find something you didn't even know was there. “There are a lot of laws, and if a prosecutor or police officer decides to go after you, you are secure You didn’t do anything?” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology, said The edge. “You're just opening yourself up to abuse, mistakes and errors. It could be a coincidence that brought you to the scene of a crime you didn't even know about.” Even assuming most officers act in good faith, there are numerous documented cases where officers have abused their power without fear of legal repercussions. There's no reason to preemptively hand over something that could be used against you.
There are some minor protections built into Apple and Google's current systems – you can show an encrypted ID without fully unlocking your phone, and various authorities can scan your ID wirelessly if they have special readers. But you don't want to find yourself in a situation where you have to dig online for the technical and legal details of your digital ID system when a police officer asks for your phone – you're much better off handing over your driver's license.