the whole "not being an automatable remote sql injection away from everything" quality of physical objects grants a filing cabinet a tremendous amount of inherent security compared to anything digital.

At smaller hotels or hostels I've had the staff take photos of ID with their own personal devices.

My guess is that the machine readable chip standards and the production quality required to replicate a physical passport are high enough that only the most organized of organized crime can fake the highest value passports effectively, and if a passport is easy to replicate, it is less likely to have visa free access to most countries.

To second the photographed/photocopied requirements, as an expat, I am frequently asked to send a scan of my passport to people or entities that are not necessarily the most secure.

I also have a couple of important documents that are literally PDFs. My Canadian citizenship certificate is a PDF with a barcode in it, that I can print off a copy of if I need to mail it, or show on my phone to a consular office or a border guard if needed. My work visa here in New Zealand is a PDF with my passport number and a visa number, which my workplace and bank checked with an online database. Fundamentally, these and my passport are pointers to a row in various databases.

Stealing a shoebox of photocopied passports from every hotel in the city sounds like way more work and way riskier than downloading an already aggregated trove of digital data.

I am working on hotel software. And we are doing an automated kiosk check in with identity scanning. I’m seriously stressed about holding on to this kind of toxic waste. I am trying to limit it as much as possible. For example throwing away scans as fast as possible (within regulatory allowances). But I would love to hear any ideas anyone has in terms of further security. Obviously the documents are not just on a public bucket. But I’m considering maybe encrypting each document with a separate key, or something along those lines.