Identity Crisis: Here Comes the Digital Driver's License

Until relatively recently, identity checks did not feature as prominently in American life as they do today, and it’s important to keep in mind that such checks are not a natural or inevitable part of life. Nor are they necessarily a reflection of the public interest. Many ID presentations, such as those in airports, banks, building lobbies, and elsewhere, though usually unquestioned, amount to little more than theater and do nothing to enhance security at the cost of creating surveillance infrastructures that erode people’s privacy.

There is no question that identifying people is sometimes a social need. But because of the way we have backed into the identity system we have today, we are not having the explicit political conversations and debates about our identity systems that we ought to be having.

This raises the danger that a relatively small cadre of corporations and specialized government bureaucracies will build a new infrastructure for their own economic and administrative purposes, regardless of the larger implications. It raises the danger that there will be no balanced assessment of the costs and benefits of such a system and that we will adopt systems that do not strike the right balance between the needs for identification, security, and convenience and Americans’ well-founded aversion to government and corporate surveillance and regimentation.

State legislators and other policymakers should ask hard questions before leaping to institute digital driver’s licenses.

State legislators and other policymakers should ask hard questions before leaping to institute digital driver’s licenses in their state. Is there a problem that we need to solve, for which mDLs are the solution? Are the side effects of that solution worth creating? Mobile driver’s licenses would likely make it harder to alter or forge driver’s licenses once they are issued. But how important is that project? There are undoubtedly occasions when people’s ability to obtain and use fake IDs have serious consequences. But how common are those situations? How bad are their consequences?

And how much will this measure help avert those situations, how much will it cost, and what side effects might it have?

It is not worth building a national identity infrastructure that will ratchet up the tracking of Americans and eviscerate online anonymity simply to reduce the scourge of college students using fake IDs to buy beer. Nor is it worth doing so to fill some cracks in the administration of our motor vehicle licensing system.

Policymakers should seek objective data on just how important more-secure IDs are in terms of reducing fraud and other serious crimes. They should ask just how much of a difference mDLs will make if they remain optional, and what the consequences will be if they’re made mandatory. They should ask broad, far-sighted questions about the likely future evolution of such a system. If the goal is a broader system that can cover a variety of authentication needs, they should ask if this is the right vehicle. And if they decide to allow digital identity systems to move forward, they should insist that they be built with the strongest possible technological and legal privacy protections.

In the end, a digital identity system could prove just and worthwhile, if it is done right. But such an outcome is far from guaranteed, and much work will have to be done to implement a digital identity system that improves individuals’ privacy rather than eroding it and is built not to enclose individuals but to empower them.

Apple and the State of Connecticut announced this week plans to make driver’s licenses available electronically through the company’s Wallet app.  This commentary, part of a larger publication, Identity Crisis:  What Digital Driver’s Licenses Could Mean for Privacy, Equity and Freedom, issued earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union, raised concerns about the digital drivers license, currently being introduced in states across the country.