Everyday I still forlornly check to see if Florida has gotten around to issuing their promised digital driver’s licenses but there’s still no joy. Instead, I just read that the EU is implementing a digital wallet that will hold all the official documents that an EU resident requires.
While the US can’t manage to get even a single state’s driver’s license implemented as a digital document, the EU s getting 27 countries to provide digital representations of a large number of necessary documents. To be fair, the EU digital wallet is still in the planning stage and is not expected to become available until at least 2022. And, of course, it’s much harder to do this sort of thing in the US. It was all we could do to standardize on Real ID and, as it is, there are still some holdouts.
To be sure, there are potential surveillance problems. This other article on the plan describes some of problems the EU digital wallet will have to solve. Florida’s Thales based digital license seems pretty good on privacy but good security hygiene demands constant vigilance. Still, digital IDs and documents are the future and there really isn’t any rational reason to drag our feet in getting them implemented. It’s nice that the EU is leading the way. Now if Florida would only start offering theirs.