Pakistan's PakID app adds digital ID cards for families and QR checks for documents
The national registration authority keeps adding services to an app with 18 million downloads, and is extending iris scans to children.
Pakistan's National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) has added three features to PakID, its official app for identity registration, updates and tracking. The app has passed 18 million downloads.
Version 5.8.0 lets users obtain digital ID cards for their spouse and eligible children and keep them alongside their own. It adds QR-code verification for the B-Form, the registration certificate for children, and for identity card cancellation certificates. And it adds biometric verification for the influenza and meningitis vaccinations required for Hajj and Umrah pilgrims.
From an app to infrastructure
Officials present the features as part of a plan to make PakID reusable public infrastructure for many services. This year the app has gained digital vehicle and civil registration services, digital identity documents, appointment booking and remote biometric verification. It increasingly stores and verifies documents and authenticates people for specific services, rather than only serving NADRA's own processes.
Iris scans for children
NADRA has also made iris scanning available for minors under 18 at more than 5,000 counters, as reported by The Express Tribune. The aim is to identify children more reliably and stop their identities being stolen or used to register someone else's child. Shabahat Ali, a media director at the authority, said the additional biometrics would help where existing records do not distinguish one child from another.
Iris scans also offer a fallback for older people, manual workers and others whose fingerprints are hard to capture. That is a practical design choice many identity systems learn late: a single biometric excludes the people whose bodies do not fit it.
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