No, Your Smartphone Is Not a Boarding Pass

The Iowa legislature is developing a system that will let you display your driver's license on a smartphone. Whoever came up with that idea must be voted out immediately.

Or, perhaps the legislators in question should just be supported by the underage kids who will inevitably figure out how to hack together a license showing that they are legal to drink (and vote). Are you 16? Naw, you're 22—with the help of a friend.

The driver's license thing is too obvious. A simple screen shot will fool a bartender checking IDs. Iowa may just lower the drinking age to 12.

Now, I am not against progress, but I do not like using the mobile phone for these sorts of extended uses for two simple reasons.

One, the actual extent of hackability of these devices is not fully known, and I'm not alone in suspecting that they are incredibly exploitable. I can guarantee that within the next couple of years, some horrendous bug in tap-and-pay NFC systems will be exploited, resulting in the theft of millions of dollars (and identities).

The second reason I do not like these uses is that they do not work well in the first place, hacked or not.

People using tap-and-pay on an iPhone are already bitching about having to still sign a print-out. I was under the impression that your fingerprint was your signature, but apparently not always. So what's the point?

But what is more bothersome are the smartphone boarding passes that some people are now using. By "some" I mean one or two people out of 100 passengers. And it's a good thing the number is that low because we'd never get on the plane if everyone used them.

In the last four or five flights I've taken, there are always a few who have these "convenient" boarding passes. Instead of pulling out a physical, paper boarding pass that you show the TSA or a gate agent, there's an image of one on your phone.

From personal observations, they work as advertised half the time, maybe. And I've talked to people using them about their experience, and all admit they are troublesome at least once in a while.

So, here's what I have observed.

The number one fail is a bar code reader that cannot scan the phone. It's a simple technological failure. Of course, that doesn't stop them from trying and trying and trying again, holding up the entire line in the process. Supervisors are called over. Everything stops. "Let's try another scanner," says the supervisor. Eventually the smartphone-equipped passenger is pushed aside to wait for the TSA or airline staff to finally give up. The supervisor leaves and calls someone or the other before the passenger is inevitably allowed to pass. This process is as mysterious as it is time consuming.

The more laughable scenario is the person in the line who finds that by the time they get to the agent, their phone has hibernated. Then they cannot find the boarding pass image after a restart. If you are standing in line behind this joker, the words you most do not want to hear are, "hold on, it's here someplace." The person fiddles and fiddles to get the image to the screen. Agh!

You do know that most airlines have kiosks that will spit out an actual boarding pass that is free, right?

And, of course, my all-time favorite happened in front of me and starred a trendy-looking woman approaching the TSA checkpoint. She was walking to the desk to show her phone-based boarding pass just as the phone rang. And she answered it! She chatted with the person explaining how she was in line at TSA and couldn't talk. She quit the call and, of course, the boarding pass was no longer on the screen and she had to fiddle around to find it. I do not know how long this took, but it was too long. It was also unnecessary when a simple piece of paper would have sent her on her way, and she could have continued the phone conversation.

I have not seen this bullcrap in action at concerts or sporting events, but I am sure similar stories abound.

It's madness. There is nothing convenient about using the mobile device as either a credit card, drivers license, virtual ticket, or boarding pass. It's a misuse of technology and just plain dumb. Please discontinue these programs immediately.