Hotels are required to see your passport when you check in. Sometimes they make a copy. This makes hotels a goldmine for criminals. How do hotels protect these sensitive documents? I guess their cyber-security posture is lacking to say the least. Though I haven’t seen any news about hotels being hacked or having a data leak.
Very poorly:
Depends on the hotel, of course, and no one here will have more info than what’s in a given hotel’s privacy policy.
Hotel chains are not known for robust cyber security and @fria posted a great example.
Unfortunately this is true of almost anything you have to provide ID for. Most organizations are terrible at cyber security and criminals prioritize targeting companies and government institutions full of juicy PII.
The actionable thing is to watch your credit report for fraud, and vote for politicians who oppose slamming everything with mandatory ID checks.
As far as I know (in the USA), hotels aren’t required to verify IDs.
Perhaps a passport card could be an improvement for Americans because it has less data.
No legal requirement on the hotel but good luck checking into anything beyond an hourly rate motel without being IDed.
Cannot recommend the passport card route enough. It has more RFID data which is considered sensitive (the government even provides an RFID blocking sleeve for it) but for going places where they just look at it or make an image scan I think it’s likely the most private ID option.
When traveling within the U.S. a drivers license is the default ID for everything including hotels.
I’ve only been asked for my passport when outside the country as that would be the only form of ID a foreign hotel would recognize.