Seventeen states currently offer digital driver's licenses and the list is slowly growing. These digital versions of your physical driver's license are stored on your mobile phone. An app is required to use a digital driver's license. The state's transportation department provides the app. Once you have a digital driver's license, iPhone users can load it into your digital wallet.
Let's start with the benefits of a digital driver's license. The first thing that comes to mind is you won't need to worry about forgetting your driver's license anymore. After all, whoever forgets their phone nowadays? Our phones have basically become a necessity to operate in everyday life. Forgetting it is not an option.
You'll be able to scan your digital license at airports. TSA PreCheck already allows this.
Many places will accept a digital driver's license, including bars, mail package pickup, and police officers. When you need to hand over your phone, you can blur out some info, such as your address.
Think about what happens when you lose your license. It's a lot of trouble to get a new one. With a digital version of your license, losing it won't be a problem anymore.
And now for the bad. You'll still have to keep a physical driver's license with you at all times. Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of digital driver's licenses? Well, you won't need to pull out the physical license in many cases. Because not all states accept digital driver's licenses, some authorities still require them and you don't know exactly who those authorities are yet. So it is best to keep the physical version on you.
Theoretically, the state's Department of Motor Vehicles could collect information about every place you visited that requires scanning your license. That information could then be turned over to authorities. While that scenario is a stretch, privacy concerns about digital driver's licenses being exploited are real.
In states that do not have a digital driver's license system, you're digital driver's license will be useless.
While digital driver's licenses aren't ready for prime time yet, we aren't that far away, either.
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