BREAKING NEWS - The Driver's Licence on the Mobile Phone? Its Now Live. Not in the country you thought: it happened first in Dubai

I am at the World Summit Awards in Abu Dhabi (the WSA is the only United Nations sponsored tech awards and its the pinnacle of mobile industry awards). The event is going on for several days. I wanted to rush and blog about this - we have a genuine World's First on something very important.

The world's first valid identification, Driver's Licence has been launched and already been out for two months (was launched late last year). Who did it? Dubai Police Department !! Its not a pdf saved on your phone, its a proper app and network connected secure ID, and on a smartphone it looks just like a regular driver's licence (and they also have the national ID card run on the same system). 

The app is one of the finalists, in the category of Mobile Government (which had several amazing finalists too). But I wanted to bring this story immediately out now, for all journalists who follow me, this is a genuine breaking news story of huge relevance. It is coming in Iowa and Arizona in the USA soon, but the world's first mobile Driver's Licence was already done, late last year, in Dubai. Do write about the story and come here to the Emirates to see it, interview the guys who created it, etc. 

Its part of the Police App that they have here, which will for example let you do an accident report if you had a fender-bender type accident, and post it in 3 minutes, so for example for insurance claims etc. You take a few pictures of the car and register the accident report with your Driver's Licence number and your car licence plate, plus the other car's licence plate, and thats it. The police will review both sides of the story, the pictures from both cars, and issue the official police report for your insurance agency. If the police department has to send an officer to come see the accident, that costs about 2,000 dollars per visit in the time the police have to allocate. Now everything is done electronically and you get your official police accident report by the next day - straight to your mobile phone haha. Brilliant.

You can also report crimes, file forms, and request assistance via the app. Its been downloaded 700,000 times... How cool is that! (I believe the Driver's Licence part so far is far less than that, as this app has been evolving much longer than the Driver's Licence part that was launched before the end of ther year).

I have some pictures that I will post (I have to remove the ID info haha, so a little bit of protective photoshopping is required..)

But any journalists and tech bloggers etc, please do celebrate the story. A World Summit Awards finalist is the Dubai Police App which includes the world's first Driver's Licence on mobile, that was launched in December 2014. 

Comments

[Louis]

What country were we supposed to think? Estonia?

[Catriona]

Delaware is looking into it, as well. I think this is an area where getting it right is much more important than being first. We need to make sure that the appropriate safeguards are in place. In the United States, the police cannot legally search the contents of a phone without a warrant, but that isn't the case in other countries, including Canada and I'm pretty sure Dubai. Plus, I'm not sure I trust handing over an unlocked phone to a police officer for several minutes after getting pulled over, Fourth Amendment or not. Does the Dubai police/national ID app track your location? What other data is it collecting?

I think this is an area that Apple and Google should get ahead of by releasing tools specifically for creating government applications that are sandboxed and can be displayed without granting any further access to the phone. They shouldn't be regular apps. Ideally Apple and Google could find common ground here, but even if one of them acts unilaterally the other would follow suit.

[AndThisWillBeToo]

An app you say?
They should have done it as a mobile web page using SMS&MMS for data transfer.

[Paul Ionescu]

That is awesome!

[Whoever]

Such a bad idea.

I can just imagine the trips to lockup because of flat phone batteries and the inability to prove a valid license.

[Crun Kykd]

Identity, currency, tickets - these are the only remaining reasons to carry a wallet. Soon the smartphone will cover all these use cases and wallets will be history. Couldn't happen soon enough for me. I hate having to worry about lost/stolen wallets.