I think no one will argue that a smartphone today is perhaps the most personal thing for every person, which can tell everything about us inside and out. Even if we leave aside photos and correspondence, there are still banking applications, passwords from social networks, search history and travel history with a list of the most visited places. Get your smartphone into the wrong hands, and their owner will be able to find out a lot of things about you that you, perhaps, yourself did not even know about. But soon there will be even more information that mobile devices will store in their memory.
Android 11 will be able to digitize documents by default, but not all
In Android 11, the first test build of which was released last night, there will be tools for digitizing and storing documents. While these are just references to the corresponding functionality, however, Google has already confirmed its appearance, which means that by the time the update is released, owners of compatible devices will be able to turn them into a reliable repository of their documentation.
How Android scans documents
Digitization of documents is an extremely complex issue that requires careful study
Despite the fact that while the necessary tools in Android 11 do not work, it is known that digitization will be done via NFC without using the camera. It turns out that in order to enter into the memory of a smartphone, say, a driver's license, you need to activate the digitization function and attach them to the back of the device for reading. It is clear that this requires a biometric driver's license, while an old-style document will not work for this. But the very fact that such an opportunity will soon appear inspires respect for the developers.
Strange as it may seem, it is rather difficult to implement the possibility of digitizing documents. After all, it's not enough just to make a smartphone scan an RFID tag that is built into an ID card; you also need to teach it to verify. To do this, Google had to obtain an appropriate permit from the Interstate Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification, which verified the scanning methods used in Android, and confirmed its reliability and safety. But since each document requires a separate certificate, at the initial stage only a driver's license can be scanned.
Where Android stores documents
But that's not all. In order for Google to be allowed to store documents in the memory of smartphones, it had to redesign the file system Android in a special way in order to allocate a protected section in it, where all digitized documents would be saved. You can't just extract them from there. To do this, you need a special reader, like the one used at airports. But since you cannot cross the border with a Russian driver's license, most likely, we will not have any sense from the digitization function until it is allowed to enter a passport into the smartphone's memory.
Despite the fact that personally I have never become a victim of a malicious attack or spyware applications, I would be careful not to add a digital copy of my document to the memory Android of my smartphone. Still, knowing the ease with which Google often approaches the issue of ensuring the security of its operating system, preparing security updates for future use and not releasing them for a month or more just in order not to break the cycle, there is no confidence in the reliability of the digitization tool yet.