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The story
Japan’s Digital Agency will begin offering a My Number Card usable via Google Wallet on Android smartphones starting October 20, 2026. A newly added “attribute verification feature” will let users complete identity checks, age verification, and residency confirmation in person using just their smartphone, with businesses on the receiving end using the free “My Number Card Face-to-Face Verification App.” On 5ch, the thread saw praise for the convenience of handling everything via smartphone clash with lingering distrust from past data-leak scandals, and the discussion ranged from the technical mechanics to the hassle of merging the card with driver’s licenses, and even into debates over who’s politically responsible for the system.
On October 2, Japan’s Digital Agency announced it will begin offering the “Android My Number Card” starting October 20. It will be used by adding it to “Google Wallet” on Android devices.
A new “attribute verification feature” will be built in, allowing identity checks, age verification, and residency confirmation to be carried out easily and reliably across various in-person services in both the public and private sectors.
For reading the card across these services, businesses can download the agency’s “My Number Card Face-to-Face Verification App” for free.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Well, that's what amateurs would think.
Didn't they suggest you just carry both cards?
Even Xiaomi's gotten pricey these days, and Galaxy's basically on par with iPhone now too.
You're literally the only one talking about that, you good?
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I mean, anything new that gets attention tends to become a hacker target, right? Especially now that even students can cook up malicious code with AI.
"This is what we get," huh — since when did Japan become a registration-required country?
Can you actually name the risks of passkeys?
Would you really feel comfortable using a passkey manufactured by the Digital Agency?
Weirdly catchy, and that's exactly what pisses me off lol
As long as this clause exists, nothing about My Number is ever going to go well. They keep rewording the fine print about "organizational negligence" versus "intentional leaks," but it's all just prep work for dodging the blame lol
It's already over before it even started.
Well, they dodged responsibility over the vaccine thing too, so… you can guess.
The worst, right?
It's always been this crappy national trait of never knowing how to cut your losses lol
Plenty's already gone wrong — just enough that they can't pin down exactly where it leaked from.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The “attribute verification feature” is a mechanism that performs only age or identity checks without handing over the My Number itself, making it a separate design from the leak risk tied to the My Number proper. In the thread, fears of “I’m scared of leaks” talked past the rebuttal that “that just shows you don’t understand how attribute verification works,” and the discussion proceeded with technical points and gut-level distrust tangled together. There was also plenty of partisan back-and-forth over “which administration is to blame,” but the My Number system itself originated from an outline presented by the Naoto Kan cabinet in 2011, was enacted into law under the Noda cabinet in 2012, and its full-scale rollout expanded under subsequent Liberal Democratic Party administrations — so pinning responsibility on a single party doesn’t match the facts. One point readers easily get confused about is conflating the expansion of the card’s functionality (this Android rollout) with past personal-data-leak incidents as if they were the same issue — and that very conflation was what fueled the heat in the thread this article is drawn from.
*This article is compiled as excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (News Express+) thread “[Digital Agency] “Android My Number Card” to launch October 20, adding “new attribute verification feature”.”
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