“It looks like drivers in the UK could soon be able to store their driver’s license within Apple’s Wallet app on iPhones as CEO of the country’s Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) today shared the image of the work in progress feature,” Jordan Kahn reports for 9to5Mac.
“Apple’s Wallet app on iOS is currently used to store Apple Pay credit cards and debit cards, as well things like boarding passes, tickets, and rewards cards,” Kahn reports. “”It appears that the UK government is working with Apple’s Wallet APIs to allow users to store their driver’s license alongside their other cards already in the app.”
So here's a little prototype of something we're working on #drivinglicence pic.twitter.com/a5eItrdiNI
— Oliver Morley (@omorley1) May 13, 2016
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: One less physical card to cary around is a Good Thing™.
SEE ALSO:
Iowa is building America’s first iPhone driver’s license – December 12, 2014
So you are going to hand your opened iPhone to the police? No, I’m not.
You have a point. If it could be done on the understanding that you only have to ‘show’ rather than ‘hand over’ you phone, then yes. Perhaps traffic cops will have readers like for airport boarding passes?
It’s just an option, you still have your physical license if you don’t feel comfortable with that.
But it is a nice option, especially if you forget and don’t have your license on you.
I sometimes forget my wallet, my iPhone is ALWAYS on me.
What a clever way to get your phone in the hands of the cops. Hell no!
Relax. Technical solutions abound. The license could have a QR code which the cop would scan, and that would allow him to let you keep the phone in your possession while allowing him or her to get the information needed to identify you and do that other stuff they do when they take your license back to the car. There would also have to be a way for him to “confiscate” your license under the proper circumstances. This could all be done electronically, so that your license would no longer display a code indicating that it’s valid.
Clearly this implies using ApplePay technology to authenticate and give license data to the police officer for checking. Even if this IS the UK (where people aren’t as paranoid or suspicious of police), I can’t imagine anyone in their sane mind would try to develop this thing so that the user would have to surrender the phone in order for the policeman to verify the information. If they are making an effort to properly deploy this data to the mobile wallet app, they will more than likely develop the back-end mobile solution for police to get the data via an ApplePay transaction.
Even better than my suggestion. And it makes you wonder, what else could this technology be used for?
If you ask me, this is ripe for fake IDs. How educated would a law officer need to be in order to verify that the license presented to him is correct and valid?
Simple, you make the background one of 16 random colours and you present the pass with a two-character + two-number ‘identifier of the day’.
That would give you a fairly simple mix of about 64K combinations; only the police would know which is the valid combination for that day.
I’ve put the front and back of my DL in an iPhone app caed Key Chain, which lets you put bar codes and images of the various cards you put in your wallet but don’t fit in ApplePay. Examples would be health insurance cards, AAA, AARP, DVA
Since I use TouchID the access to these cards is still protected – more protected than cards in your wallet when pickpockets are around. The wife discovered that in Paris last month.