Apple’s Digital Drivers Licenses Now Available in Eight States as Iowa Signs On
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After three years of relatively slow uptake, Apple’s Digital ID initiative is finally hitting its stride. This week, Iowa joined in, becoming the eighth US state to support digital driver’s licenses and state ID cards in Apple Wallet.
The Iowa Department of Transportation announced yesterday that “Iowans will now have the option to securely add their Iowa driver’s license or ID to Apple Wallet on their iPhone and Apple Watch.”
Adding an Iowa driver’s license or ID works as expected from the other seven states where it’s already rolled out. The process is initiated in Apple’s Wallet app by tapping the plus button to add a new card and then selecting “Driver’s License or State ID” and “Iowa” — a new option on the list.
Iowa joins Arizona, Maryland, Colorado, Georgia, Ohio, California, and Hawaii. While the first four of those states took a couple of years to fully embrace Apple Wallet, adoption has ramped up considerably this year; Ohio, California, and Hawaii all signed on over the summer, and the addition of Iowa now means that we’ve seen as many new states join in the past four months as we did in the nearly three years before that.
The Iowa press release notes that its digital IDs can be used “at select TSA checkpoints, including the Des Moines and Eastern Iowa Airports, businesses and venues, in addition to Apple Store locations across the U.S.” Select apps also allow digital IDs to be presented directly from Apple Wallet for things like age verification when ordering alcohol online.
The announcement also names apps like Tap2iD Mobile, VeriScan, and Mobile ID Verify as options for businesses and organizations to use for in-person age verification. These apps run directly on an iPhone without the need for any additional hardware and can be used to confirm a customer’s age from a digital ID without exposing irrelevant information such as an address or blood type.
You Still Can’t Leave Your Physical ID at Home
Despite these advances, there will likely still be a market for iPhone wallet cases for years to come. It’s going to be a long time before digital IDs are widely accepted enough that you’ll be able to leave your physical driver’s license at home.
Your Iowa driver’s license or state ID in Apple Wallet does not replace your physical license or identification card.Iowa Department of Transportation
All of the states that have announced digital IDs make it clear that these aren’t a replacement for your physical driver’s license. Amid all the recent positive news about using your digital ID in apps and local businesses, none of them have yet addressed the elephant in the room: law enforcement.
That’s because this is a far tougher nut for state governments to crack. In theory, a police officer can scan your digital driver’s license at the side of the road, but the catch is that they’ll need the proper equipment.
While Apple’s digital IDs aren’t proprietary — they’re based on an open mobile driver’s license (mDL) standard — they rely on near-field communications (NFC) to securely and authoritatively present their credentials. Visual inspection won’t suffice. So, even if you were willing to unlock your iPhone and hand it to a cop on the side of the road, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between your official state-issued digital driver’s license and a really good Photoshop job.
Validating the Driver’s License requires a device that’s capable of reading it via NFC — and that has to be a mobile device that a cop is carrying with them. They can’t take your iPhone back to their cruiser to run it through the computer there, at least not unless you come along with it. The information from your digital driver’s license can only be presented after it’s requested from the terminal and you authorize it with a Face ID scan.
There’s also the education and comfort factor. Many folks are very justifiably much more nervous about handing their iPhone over to the police than they are with a plastic card. Apple’s digital driver’s licenses don’t require your iPhone to leave your hand, nor do they require you to unlock it to present your digital ID, but it’s still going to take some time for the interpersonal interactions between police and members of the public to reach the point where this becomes the norm.
However, the biggest obstacle to this comes down to the same thing it usually does: money. It’s not hard to imagine cops being equipped with mobile terminals or iPhones with mobile apps to scan these digital driver’s licenses, but the funds for those have to come from somewhere, and that’s ultimately the taxpayers, the politicians, and the bureaucrats who manage those funds. Buying thousands of iPhones or specialized terminals so cops can scan digital IDs is a pretty hard sell for most state governments, not to mention the city police forces in those states. Plastic cards are much cheaper.
