You use your phone to pay for things, to check the weather, and hopefully listen to Radio IQ when you’re outside our listening area. But now, thanks to a new program from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, you can now use it as your state ID in some places.
You’ll still need your physical ID for a while, but DMV Commissioner Gerald Lackey hopes that’ll change soon enough. Thanks to the launch of Mobile ID, he thinks we’re getting closer.
“We’ve gotten to the point where people buy those little magnetic things on the back of their phones just to carry their ID’s with them, we’re tapping to pay everywhere," Lackey said in an interview with Radio IQ. "It’s time that we get your ID into the phone itself.”
Right now, you can go to your phone’s app store and download the Virginia Mobile ID, scan your existing ID and your face and use it to vote, get through TSA at the airport and, at a few Richmond-area ABC store locations, buy booze.
There’s no new cost, it's included in the regular ID fee, and Lackey said it’s a deeply secure system.
“They don’t store any of your credentialed information, no one knows where you’ve used it. There’s no way to capture that, it’s not backed up to a server somewhere," Lackey said. "So, it is a completely encrypted one-to-one transaction making it one of the most secure ways to confirm your identity.”
Virginia Mobile ID is up and running now. DMV hopes to expand the system to more retailers, restaurants, and law enforcement agencies in the near future.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
