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What You Don’t Know About Putting Your Driver’s License on an iPhone
It’s not a picture, it’s your real license
Apple’s promise of adding driver’s licenses and state IDs to Apple Wallet is coming to fruition and bringing with it a wallet-full of questions.
As soon as I posted the news, people expressed concerns about holding up their phone or, worse, handing it over so an official can ogle your license on the screen.
That’s not how this works. Let’s look at how it does.
Getting the license on your device
For those living in Arizona and Georgia (and soon Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah), the process of adding your driver’s license to your phone’s wallet starts with your existing, physical license.
As you might’ve guessed, you do follow on-screen prompts to scan in both sides of your license. You also take a selfie and even get a little bit of facial and head movement scanning. Each of these tasks has a slightly different purpose.
When Apple scans the license, it’s looking at that barcode on the back, which contains all the crucial information on the front. The selfie is used to compare to the photo on the front of the license. And the head movement stuff is a bit like…
