Digital Driver's Licenses

There's an app for almost everything these days, whether it's shopping, tracking your eating or exercise or finding your way. Now driver's licenses are making the transition from a card carried in a pocket or purse to a digital application on your mobile phone.

Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Maryland, Wyoming and the District of Columbia are carrying out limited trials of digital driver's licenses. Iowa and Louisiana are planning to issue digital licenses to every motorist who wants one beginning this year.

What about the security of digital licenses in an age when it seems everything can be hacked? Digital licenses are protected by password, PINs and other security features in addition to the usual security built into phones, and state authorities can wipe a digital license remotely if a driver reports it lost to the Department of Motor Vehicles. (NBC News, May 24, 2018)
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For data privacy, digital driver's licenses are an extremely bad idea. If you are stopped by the police for some minor traffic violation, the police officer will ask to see your driver's license, vehicle registration, proof of insurance, etc. But what does the police officer do with your documents? He or she takes them back to the police vehicle, runs your information through a data terminal mounted in the vehicle or radios the information into to a dispatcher who runs it.

If you driver's license is on your phone, the police officer now takes your unlocked phone back to the police vehicle. There is nothing to now prevent the police from taking a quick look through the content of your phone. Some police departments may even copy the entire content of your cell-phone as we see in this 2011 article in Geek. According to the article:

"If you’re a Michigan citizen, you may want to be careful about what you have on your cell phone. Apparently Michigan State Police have been using a high-tech mobile forensics device that can pull information from over 3,000 types of cell phones in under only two minutes.

The information the device is able to export is basically everything from your smartphone, including call history, deleted phone data, text messages, contacts, images, and GPS data. And don’t think you’ll be safe if your phone is password-protected, the device can get around that too.

The police don’t even need a warrant to scan your phone. They can pull your information without your consent, and without any reasonable cause. The Cellebrite UFED scanner has been used by MSP since at least August 2008.

It would be one thing if these scanners are being used on people who were suspected of a crime, but police officers are scanning the phones of drivers stopped in minor traffic violations."